I am wondering whether it’s just me or if other people would mistake what is being said in the following headline and lead paragraph from an article on Chattahbox.com?
“New Study Shows Waiting For Sex The Right Move?
England (ChattahBox) – A new study done by the University College, London, has shown that women who wait to have sex with their partners are more likely to find a reliable, long term relationship.”
When I read this I was encouraged by what I understood to be news confirming that young women who “save themselves for marriage” (a phrase favored by the public in olden days) are being rewarded with more reliable, long term relationships. Christian parents have been telling their sons and daughters this for more than two thousand years. We didn’t really need scientific confirmation, but confirmation coming from a major university was, I thought, nonetheless welcome.
However, as I read on through the article it became clear to me that I had misunderstood the lead paragraph. It isn’t that young women are “saving themselves for marriage,” they are just saving themselves for the second date! As it turns out, even this slight brush with chastity is yielding better results than when women are willing to “immediately give it up.”
I can’t help but wonder if the (anonymous) author of the article is pulling our legs when he/she writes, “… the tradition of waiting until after the first few dates (emphasis supplied) to sleep with a new man is one that has been closely held by many women for generations…” (emphasis incredulously supplied)
Can the author possibly be serious about this? Admittedly, I’m getting older. I’ve been married almost forty years, but I can’t imagine that generations have come and gone since women, most women, remained unwilling to sleep with a man on the first, third, fortieth or sixty-third date if a wedding ceremony had not intervened.
As a young man I dated a number of young women, several more than once, and a few several times. In the eighteen months of my longest running high school romance I must have gone out on something like 75 dates with my girlfriend, and I calculate well over 150 dates over a 2-year period with the young woman I married. There was never any question that these young women were “saving themselves for marriage.” It was unthinkable even to test their resolve in the matter.
Even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when we were all under constant bombardment with sensationalized news stories about “Free Love” and the “Sexual Revolution”, chastity remained the norm, or at least the goal, for the vast majority of young American women, and especially young Christian women. I know, I was there.
Okay, I guess the 1970s were a pretty long while back. On the other hand, gravity has been in operation since the planet was formed, and it still pulls us down rather than repelling us upward. Luckily, humans can’t diddle around much with the operation of gravity.
