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Sex Is Not Love, Oh What A Concept:  A Look At Where We Are At As A Society and Culture.

Gee what a concept.  How many times have you heard the title of this article before?  If we have heard it so many times then why is sex still often confused with love?  Why do our teens pursue this as if it were the Holy Grail?   Why do Adults pursue it?  I asked myself this after comparing feelings after meaningless sex with the feelings I have after going to communion and confession or attending mass. Mind you I did not just recently go out and have meaningless sex.  I had to remember the feelings.  They can not compare.  The feelings you have when you follow our religion and reject temptation are indescribable compared to that one little orgasm.  God’s joy last so much longer and it can be spread without getting a disease.

I am on a mission of celibacy and I feel like a missionary.  I say the latter for I am going up against a huge advertising giant.  Sex is well marketed and firmly entrenched in our culture.  This is why I feel like a missionary.  I feel the same way the first Spanish missionaries felt when they arrived in this land to find a tribal culture so entrenched in their pagan ways.

Consider how premarital sex can affect relationships. One study showed that the average high school relationship will last only twenty-one days once the couple has sex. Furthermore, couples who sleep together before they are married have a divorce rate three times as high as couples who saved that gift for the wedding night.ⁱ Couples who want what’s best for their relationship or future marriage will wait. Beyond their own relationship, premarital sex frequently causes tension within families because of the dishonesty that usually accompanies the hidden intimacies. Relationships with friends are often strained, and when things turn sour, the gossip and social problems often become unbearable.  If You Really Loved Me, a new book by Jason Evert.

I often ask my friends about sex before marriage just to come up with different answers.  I found the above passage in the book so depressing and discouraging, If You Really Loved Me. I truly feel for our teens and what sex is doing to their innocence.  I am looking at what todays teens must go through to find love and I am glad that I do not have to go through what they have to.  Our culture today is way more bombarded by sex then when I was a teen.  I do not envy what they have to grow up with.  Just look at all the ways that temptation is thrown at these poor teens. I had just TV.  They have the internet, TV, Movies, Music, and Literature.  I really never had to think about sex before marriage as a teen.  It never really entered my mind till college.  My faith was not as strong as it is now.  I broke with the church in college only to get tangled up in meaningless relationships when I should have been paying attention to my studies.

I often wish I was able to with hold my virginity also I often wish I had that gift to give to someone I truly love.  Our society can put up with female virgins.  In fact I know one that is living quite happily and is very good practicing Catholic in her early thrities, but Society for some reason frowns on men being virgins.  Look at the movie the Forty Year Old Virgin.  Where is the support for these men?  There is none.  Our society is very sexually oriented and wants its men to be sexually active.  I think our society believes the more sexually active its males are the more successful society will be.

Just to make this point look at all our politicians.  Not to pound on a man that is down, John McCain is a perfect example.  Look at his wife Cindy.  He married her and divorced his ex wife because she was in an accident.  Perhaps John McCain figured that Cindy being so good looking would be his ticket to higher political office.  Where are the Barbara Bush’s and the Eleanor Roosevelt of the world?  What ever happened to long lasting marriages?  When you reach the point where the divorce rate in society is at the fifty percent level then you know the American Family is losing. 

I myself sit shell shocked after two marriages.  Will I ever find a person that I can love?  Sure I will, but I need to reevaluate what love is.  How do you do that?  Many people do not realize it but the perfect model has been with us for the last 2000 years.  The Holy family is our model.  If you want to know what love is look to Jesus and to his Heavenly Father.  This is where we should be looking for “Perfect Love”.   Instead we look for it in movies and pop culture.  Madonna and Brad Pitt know squat about love.  Madonna has been married so many times that they installed a revolving door at her house.  Oprah Winfrey, the Queen of Pop Culture, thinks so highly of marriage that she refuses to tie the knot. 

In Search of Love, Taking The Sex Out of The Equation.

Our role models should be found in the church.  We must look to Jesus first and then the Saints and our leaders. Think of this as a review of what love should be.  In the next couple of days I will attempt to define what love should be.

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