Sex and Respect

A recent post got me thinking about what led me to give up the idea that a man choosing to wait until marriage to have sex with his significant other was a sign of respect for her. There was a time, of course, when I held this view very strongly. I had been raised to view that any young man who would even consider having sex with a young woman before marriage did not respect her, and that any relationship built on that foundation would be troubled.

While in college I met a young man—Sean. I initiated a relationship with him even though he didn’t meet every point on my checklist. There was just something about him, something that drew me to him in spite of the differences. As our relationship progressed, I found Sean increasingly baffling. He simply didn’t fit in the dichotomous picture I had created of the world around me.

Sean didn’t believe that sex before marriage was wrong. However, when I said I didn’t want to have sex—or even kiss—until marriage, he respected that. He didn’t pressure me. This ran counter to everything I’d grown up “knowing” about men. Here was a man who wanted to have sex with me and didn’t have any convictions about waiting for marriage, but he wasn’t pressuring me to have sex with him? What was this?! I couldn’t understand what I was experiencing because I had been taught that it is men who believe sex should be saved for marriage who respect women, and that those who do not believe this go around pressuring every girl they meet into putting out.

But over time I began to see that Sean really and truly respected me—not the rules, not some sort of requirement, me. There was nothing holding him back from having sex with me but me—no God, no eternal damnation, no belief that having sex before marriage would lead to broken relationships, just me. And somehow that was enough. It took a while for me to truly trust him, though, because I had been taught to associate willingness to have sex before marriage with lack of respect. His willingness to have sex before marriage was supposed to be a warning sign that something was badly, badly wrong with our relationship. Except that it wasn’t.

Before meeting Sean, I thought a man should respect his significant other by not having sex with her before marriage. Sean showed me that a man could respect his significant other by respecting her consent. I began to see respect as at once less formulaic and more mutual. I ultimately did have sex with Sean before we got married, but not until much later. I didn’t have sex with him because I felt like I had to, or because I felt pushed by Sean. I had sex with him because I wanted to, and because a series of events (which I plan to write about in more detail soon) had shaken my automatic trust in everything my parents had taught me, and this had led me to rethink my position on a lot of issues—including sex before marriage.

When Sean and I did finally have sex, it wasn’t a sign that he had any less respect for me than he had had before we started having sex. Both before and after Sean had been interested in having sex with me, but in both cases—before I was ready to have sex and after—he respected my consent. When I said “no,” he respected that. When I said “yes,” he respected that too. And of course, this sort of respect should go both ways—if it is the woman in a relationship who wants to have sex and the man who doesn’t, she should respect his consent by accepting his “no” as well. That’s how consent works.

Whether or not you wait until marriage to have sex has nothing to do with respect. Whether or not you value your partner’s consent when it comes to sex, in contrast, has everything to do with respect.

In many, many ways, respect is not the formula I had been taught it was. In many ways, Sean respected me more than any man in my life had up to that point, including my father. For example, Sean believed I was competent to make my own decisions and think through political or theological issues on my own. He treated me as an adult. He actually really and truly respected me. Sean showed me what true respect looked like.

I should clarify that I don’t think it would have been wrong if Sean had decided to break up with me because his view of what a relationship should look like had to include sex. People break up over a variety of incompatibilities, and different positions on sex—or different desires when it comes to sex—can absolutely be an incompatibility. It absolutely would have been wrong, in contrast, if Sean had taken it upon himself to pressure me into having sex with him.

So what was it that led me to give up the idea that a man choosing to wait until marriage to have sex with his significant other was a sign of respect for her? The answer is simple. It was meeting a man who didn’t believe sex needed to be saved for marriage, and yet thoroughly respected me. This shook up my world, because from my perspective Sean was an impossibility—something that should not have been. And yet there he was.