Some people state that it has been easy for me to turn away from sex because I had my fill or got bored with it, not understanding the nature of addiction and that there is no bottom to Sexual desire. You can spend your whole lifetime pursuing new forms of sexual gratification and never feel satisfied. The real reason I was able to stop fornicating was because I repented before God, and was given strength by Him to break the cycle of sin, not because—as if often claimed—I ran out of sex partners or because my testosterone was depleted. Pre-marital sex is simply not compatible with a life in Christ, and so I made my choice. To add to that fact, I offer five practical reasons why you should preserve your purity until marriage.
1. Once you start, you may never be able to stop
You open a bag of potato chips and think you can have just a couple, or you open a pint of ice cream and say you’ll only have a few spoons, but next thing you know, half of the bag is empty, the entire pint is gone. Sex is more pleasurable than bagged snacks and ice cream. The physical ecstasy, dopamine rush, and personal validation from even loveless, drunken sex is such that you can get attached to it immediately, as I did.
Many men argue with me that they want just a little bit of experience with sex to make them “confident” or “experienced,” but these lame excuses were put into their minds by the evil one. The only confidence and experience it gives you is with fornication and other sins, not love or marriage. And since you were weak enough to listen to Satan to fall for such a trifling excuse, to dance in intimate embrace with him without thinking that you would get burned, it will be effortless for him to convince you to sleep around with even more easy women for “valuable experience” while “waiting for the one,” which will never come because your mind has been turned into mush from being in a state of continual lust and sexual passion. For every one man who returns to chastity, a dozen more are still cruising dating apps, haggling with “Sugar Babies” over a soy-laden meal in Applebee’s, or planning trips to Southeast Asia or South America to sleep with prostitutes. Once you start lusting after women, your fallen flesh is on auto-pilot to seek it more and more.
2. It taints you for a pure mate
If you destroy your sexual purity and later repent, that’s enough for God, but will it be enough for a virgin partner to accept you as a spouse? Look at me as an example. What percentage of female Orthodox virgins with a proper upbringing would select me as a husband? Would their fathers allow me to marry their daughters? If I had a pure daughter, and she brings home a middle-aged man who went on a decades-long sex bender around the world, I would chain her up in the basement until she changed her mind, because while that man is a Christian now, I do not want to be anxious that he will simply go back to his old ways and harm my lovely daughter.
Staying away from sex keeps you in the running for women who are doing the same, because I tell you that faithful young women have their pick of Christian men to choose from. If you’ve fallen hard in the world then you should be paired with someone who also fell hard. The excuse “There are no good women” should not be uttered by depraved masturbators and fornicators like myself who were anything but good for most of their adult lives.
3. It permanently damages you
God may heal your soul from sexual sin but your body and mind remain damaged for the remainder of your life. Your memory remains tainted and you have flashbacks of your sin at the moments you least desire. Your emotions become disordered due to uniting in one flesh with a multitude of harlots who played games with your heart for their amusement. Your mind becomes more perverted and attached to carnal and profane ways of Behavior. You develop relationship habits that are suitable for secular pairings but damaging for a Christian marriage. Your discernment disappears as you find it difficult to evaluate potential partners without objectifying them sexually or focusing on skin-deep traits.
Another severe form of damage is wasted time. All those years I spent perfecting my “game” could have been spent building my faith and becoming part of a parish where I could’ve found a wife and already had children. Where is my game now to help me when it’s the last thing I need to find and land a wife? What use is my “cold approach” skills to chat up random girls, of which I no longer do? And if you disagree with those statements, thinking that game is needed, then your faith is not where it should be to believe that you need a modality designed solely to satisfy your passions to help you within the Christian institution of marriage. You need to be a man, and know what that means, but you don’t need game.
4. It haunts you later
You will continually feel a multitude of negative emotions stemming from your sexual experiences: shame, foolishness, mourning, guilt. Through your behavior, Satan paved an asphalt highway to your heart that he will use to tempt you in the future at will, in a way he simply couldn’t if you had remained pure. He will fill your mind daily—and sometimes hourly—with sexual ideas you experienced firsthand and give you the filthiest of dreams that won’t be unfamiliar to you. The amount of sexual sewage that Satan sends in my dreams is reason alone to wish I never took on the “sexually liberated” path. Do you think all these downsides will have a positive effect on a future relationship? I have to work much harder than men who struggled to maintain their purity just to keep foul images and temptation at bay.
5. It distances you from God
This should be reason alone to avoid pre-marital sex but we are weaker than Christians of the past and may need worldly encouragement. If you have sex outside of marriage, a mortal sin, and fail to repent, God turns away from you. He can not stand to see His creatures participating in behaviors He did not intend. You are no longer working with God when committing such behaviors so He will not work with you. He still loves you, and will forgive your sins if you seek Him out and confess, but you need to claw your way back to His grace through a tearful process of repentance which will still leave you with permanent damage.
Conclusion
It’s extremely difficult to turn away from sex after a period of even short involvement, because the demons you empowered through your behavior do not want to let you go, thinking that they were so close to dragging you to hell. I am now able to control the sexual urges that I have fed for so long with God’s help, but I know I’m only a couple of prideful steps away from falling backward into the same behavior, or even worse behavior, and thus must spend an inordinate amount of energy and prayer at keeping my passions at bay. In other words, I must be admitted as a lifelong patient in the spiritual hospital, whereas other men who remained a virgin can live as an outpatient, visiting the doctor and speaking to him less frequently. It would have been far better if I did not start this behavior at all. There is no amount of casual sex that is healthy, moderate, or safe. Stay away from it completely, and may you be blessed by God with a suitable spouse if that is His will for you.
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