The girls in our sophomore English class were in agreement: this boy was hot. Tall, dimples when he smiled, soccer player (next to swimmers, known to have the best athlete bods), blond but unafraid to dye his hair on occasion, smelled like Cool Water (the cologne we, in our virginal states, referred to as a “do-me” scent).
After using my feminine wiles (i.e., reading a funny essay I’d written aloud in class) to capture his attention, I asked him to girls’ choice. The following week, he asked me to the movies. It was all considered a bit of a coup. He was hot. I was most decidedly not.
Sophomore year only a few kids with December birthdays drove, so dating in our suburban town mostly entailed phone calls and getting rides to the movies from parents. This meant that the boy and I spent little time outside of school in actual, unobserved proximity to each other. Tittering girlfriends always swarmed around at school; we had roughly four conversations that I can recall. One in which he handed me his headphones and played me the Sheryl Crow cover of “D’yer Mak’er,” another in which we talked of the death of pets. He sent me a postcard from his spring break vacation. It was not love.
It was not love, but I was desperate for him to kiss me. Not necessarily because of some burning desire to be close to him, to know him—I was in fact terrified of such a thing—but because I was fifteen and had never been kissed. Not on the playground in grade school, not at church camp or the eighth-grade graduation dance, not by my Homecoming date. My destiny as an “old maid” was well on its way to being fulfilled, I was sure of it. Kissing a recognizably attractive boy would change all that.
We broke up a scant four months later, before he got around to kissing me, when my parents grounded me (for maybe the most rebellious thing of my adolescent life, leaving a church lock-in at midnight for donuts and a visit to a moonlit Lake Michigan beach nearby) for the rest of the summer. Before that infraction, it never occurred to me that I could or should be the one to make a move; I never imagined that he might be shy or insecure. In my adolescent despair (grounded all summer!?), I self-sacrificially set him free. At which point he immediately began dating my friend and became her first love. These things happen.
I was devastated, though it was probably clear even then that my motivations for being with him were of, shall we say, dubious moral worth. Luckily, only a kiss was at stake. For most of us sexual desire, and its relationship to sexual activity, is often pretty complicated. We may well have many reasons for wanting things, many reasons for taking action. Faithful people would probably prefer that our reasons for connecting with someone else sexually were to manifest the care and love and glory of God rather than a simple physical impulse. But how do we know what makes a desire good, life-giving, and holy? We are complex people, and our decisions and desires are subsequently equally complex.
Desire complicates the already theologically complex nature of pleasure, for if pleasure is a “premoral good,” as we saw in the previous chapter, desire raises questions of morality. Is desire, wanting, always sinful, or does it depend on the object of our desire? What desires can rightly be pursued? When? With whom?
Here, I want to reflect on “firsts” to help us to understand our complicated desires. Throughout this chapter we’ll explore the different facets of desire: Is desire ever sinful, or evil? What makes sexual desire a wonderful, holy thing? And what makes a desire—even an unmarried, sexual one—an opportunity for grace? We’ll look at the ends of our desires, the call to self-reflection, and try to imagine how sexual desire might be “love trying to happen.”
THE SOCCER PLAYER, as I mentioned, became the first love of one of my girlfriends, and I spent a couple of months mourning and moping. I recovered quickly enough, however, when my own first love arrived six months later in the form of another athlete, a boy who ran track with my best friend and made the whole class laugh. We had gone out in groups, to dinners and movies, and he asked me to Homecoming the night of a friend’s birthday party at his house. After the dance he held my hand and I (brazen hussy, no longer leaving anything up to chance) kissed his cheek as I walked him to the car.
A week later I was home sick from a speech tournament (drama nerds for the win!), and my family was out for the evening. This young man called to ask if he could stop by. He brought me a box of Swiss Miss instant hot chocolate, to help me feel better, and some music: the first and, to most people’s knowledge, only Hootie & the Blowfish CD, and a copy of REM’s Automatic for the People. With any sort of distance from the moment, this combination of offerings would seem ridiculous, if not actually the opposite of romantic. But it was perfect. “Hold My Hand” was on the radio constantly and offered a fitting invitation; REM was his favorite band; and only communists hate hot chocolate.1
He rang my doorbell, came in, and presented his gifts. We made small talk before he hugged me, gave me a quick, closed-mouth kiss on the lips, and went home. I, being sixteen and only able to process my life through conversation, went back to my room to call my friend. This kiss, no disrespect to my young beau intended, was not the life-altering event I had imagined it would be.
I had expected to feel different: somehow more fully alive, or more connected; I had expected to be overwhelmed with romantic feeling. Maybe awakened from an enchanted sleep, or saved from a witch’s curse. I expected that the first brush of another person’s lips on mine would be charged, would feel different, truth be told, than if we’d just brushed arms. The musicals, Disney movies, and romance novels I’d been raised on may have raised expectations, but so had our night at the dance. He had held my hand, stroked my palm with his finger. An apparently absentminded gesture riveted my attention to this boy, made me lose track of time, caused me to blush and thrill. Surely given all this, and the fact that I really liked him—because this was not simply the result of a playground chase—this kiss would feel momentous.
Upstairs on the phone, my friend Erin prompted, “Well . . . ?”
“Is that all there is to it?”
She was nonchalant. Kissing isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be.
THE PREVIOUS SPRING, Erin and I had sat together in a state-mandated health class as we learned about drugs, eating disorders, and sexually transmitted disease through a combination of fiercely dry textbook readings and showings of ancient after-school specials. Teaching the course was the sophomore girls’ basketball coach, and to say he was more uncomfortable with the subject matter than his students were would be a dramatic understatement. We passed notes full of our adolescent, but certainly amusing, commentary almost constantly through that class, but I give thanks for it: it’s a too rare blessing (or too rarely respected right) for American teenagers to have access to comprehensive sex education these days.
My absolute most favorite part of that class was the typology of making out Coach presented us with.
“First, you’ve got your kissing. Then, French kissing. Light petting. After you start moving into heavy petting, you’re getting awfully close to the Danger Zone.”
He was certainly trying to tell us something important about taking things slow, and making sure we weren’t getting in over our heads—teaching us what we needed to know in order to avoid accidentally passing some point of no return when unprotected sex was bound to transpire. To his credit, our trained and certified teacher did not resort to any sports analogies, especially regarding rounding the bases. But we just laughed and sang Kenny Loggins under our breath.
That night when my new boyfriend arrived to kiss me, this, then, was what surprised me. Our lips met, in my empty house! and yet afterward I was not one inch closer to the Danger Zone.
It only took a week until the boy and I had another go at the kissing thing. On this occasion, we patently ignored the Meg Ryan–Tim Robbins vehicle I.Q. for the duration of its hundred-minute running time. God bless his mother for clearing out of their living room, and for clearing her throat loudly as she came back in to make tea.
That’s not a facetious comment: I felt blessed by the give and take, the intimacy and the excitement, of this first make-out session. The only danger involved lay in our desire to kiss until our previously untested lips grew chapped and puffy, but I learned something of deep importance that night, a lesson affirmed over and over during the months we were together: I could pursue my desire to be close to someone and feel good about that desire before, during, and after.
Now there are those who would dispute this conviction, and would wonder why my parents kept letting me leave the house when it was increasingly obvious that this boy and I were doing more than watching movies and drinking hot cocoa.
THE FIRST STORY of human desire offered by the Bible tells of a pursuit with long-ranging and widespread consequences: The Lord has prohibited the first man and woman from eating the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, but the woman sees that the fruit looks good, and she wants some. She acquiesces to her desire—whether it’s hunger, curiosity, or some potent mix of motives—and eats. Subsequently, as the story goes, the happy couple is banished from the garden and cursed; the rest of humanity is likewise cursed—original sinners courtesy of these first parents. Human desire, it seems, brings nothing but trouble.
I have little kids now—three daughters—and my husband, Josh, and I routinely revisit the distinction between wants and needs with them: you are hungry and need something to eat; you want a Happy Meal or an ice cream. You need clothes that fit; you want that ridiculously overpriced shirt that resembles the one you saw on TV. Just because the distinction is easy for me to see, doesn’t mean it’s as clear to them. Also confusing is that sometimes—often, if we’re lucky—our needs and desires can be simultaneously met. We can be hungry, need sustenance, and desire something healthy. Sometimes the warm, comfortable sweater we need is also beautiful. This is, actually, part of my goal in parenting: not just to help my girls to differentiate between needs and desires, but also to bring them into close alignment.
Certain strains of Christianity think that pursuing any sort of desire short of God is sinful, and that the most ascetic lifestyle possible is the holiest. Fasting, vows of poverty, lifelong celibacy: these aim to make room for the Spirit and conquer sin by shrinking the self, by diminishing or denying various needs and desires. Sometimes those practices can become dangerous, motivated by the hatred or distrust of our God-given bodies.
For these strains, both the objects of our desire and the act of desiring itself are problematic. Eve was guilty of two sins: wanting the forbidden fruit, and then eating it. That is, I want the apple, so to hell with the prohibition against my having it. What I want is the most important thing. Desire leads Eve astray, and it’s been known to do the same for many of us. We might fairly wonder whether our desires—or the bodies in which they seem to have their origin—can be trusted. I wanted the soccer player to kiss me, so when he showed up at the church lock-in and my friends suggested we go for a spin after lights-out, I thought maybe the moonlit beach would be an encouraging venue. Desire clouded my judgment.
Later, after that seminal viewing of I.Q., I learned that Coach was on to something in his description of the Danger Zone. For the first time, I experienced the pull of something that was both within me and outside myself, to keep going—that powerful feeling of not wanting something to stop, of not wanting to stop. In Romans 7, there’s a passage that’s often labeled “the inner conflict.”
For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.
(18–20)
My boyfriend’s mother would always graciously clear her throat on entering the room, but I’m sure she routinely saw more than I would reasonably have wanted her to see as he and I lingered in an embrace for a moment too long, unwilling to stop. I didn’t want her to see, but I didn’t want to stop. So I didn’t.
Desire is powerful.
But is it necessarily the sin that dwells within me? Is it evil to make out with someone you really like? Is that what Paul’s getting at here?
Sebastian Moore, a Benedictine monk and theologian, offers another reading of the Genesis story that seems relevant: one that claims we’re misunderstanding desire when we “equate it with egoism.”2
Rather than the manifestation of selfishness and sin, desire, Moore contends, “is love trying to happen.”3 Does desire come from some lesser cosmic force, some lower part of our human architecture, from outside of us? Is it always and necessarily evil? No. Desire is about us figuring out who we are, and how we can be in relationship with others.
The desire for pleasure can, as we saw in the first chapter, be a perfectly healthy and holy thing: we need body pleasure. And, for me, the desire for and exploration of pleasure were part and parcel of coming to trust my boyfriend; they were part of falling in love. The desire was love trying to happen.
In the best of all possible worlds, it would ever be so. But, of course, that’s not always the case. Moore concedes that “no desire is so prone to self-deception, to the very subtlest ploys of our egoism, as is sexual desire.”4
During my sixteenth year, I am certain that my egoism was making more than subtle ploys, but at the same time I was—gratefully, ridiculously, with limited success at secrecy—learning about myself, about my desires, and about how to be in a relationship with another person, body and soul.
The experience of making out with this strawberry-blond boy, of being close to another body, moved me to awe and wonder, but it wasn’t just the physical pleasure of it that kept me on that couch at his house every weekend for the better part of a year. As many people, women and men, young and old, know, if you’re in the market for a quick peak or release of tension, you can take care of that physical urge with relative efficiency on your own. Sexual pleasure, and sexual desire, are about more than the sensations brought to you by the nervous system and the sensory responses that accompany blood flow to varied regions of one’s body. The experience of good sex—and the delightful things that lead up to it—is one of risking showing and sharing oneself with another, of giving and receiving care and attention, of connection and delight. It tends to require a partner, and an enthusiastic, sensitive one as well.
For all the ambivalence of the Christian traditions toward desire, and sexual desire in particular, for all the warnings and prohibitions, our holy scriptures nonetheless contain a deeply erotic and romantic love poem in the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) book called the Song of Songs (or, sometimes, the Song of Solomon). Perhaps because it’s so erotic, faithful folks have a long history of trying to contain the passion, claiming it’s clearly about marital love between a husband and wife, or an allegory about the love of God for Israel.
But, well.
In chapter five, the woman describes a fevered dream:
[Woman]
I was sleeping, but my heart was awake.
A sound! My love is knocking:
[Man]
“Open for me, my sister, my dearest,
my dove, my perfect one!
My head is soaked with dew,
my hair, with the night mists.”
[Woman]
“I have taken off my tunic—
why should I put it on again?
I have bathed my feet—
why should I get them dirty?”
My love put his hand in through the latch hole,
and my body ached for him.
I rose; I went to open for my love,
and my hands dripped myrrh,
my fingers, liquid myrrh,
over the handles of the lock.
(5:2–5, CEB)
Despite the millennia separating us from this text’s ancient author, many of us may know that feeling: of hungering and longing for the touch, presence, taste, scent, sight, and even sound of the one we desire. The speaker pleads with her sisters, “If you find him, tell him this: I am faint with love.”
Puffy lips, breath shallow, and rapid, flushed cheeks: Friday nights found me faint with love. It wasn’t just the actual fulfillment of desire that led to such exquisite suffering; it was often simply, as the songwriter says, the nearness of you.5
SEXUAL DESIRE CAN be about a lot of different things: about feeling powerful, alive, about experiencing attention and pleasure. It can also open us to love and acceptance by daring us to risk knowing another and being known. It may sound crazy, but sexual desire can be a means of grace. That’s why I don’t buy that Song of Songs is mostly about Israel.
I recently read Rainbow Rowell’s incredible young adult novel Eleanor & Park.6 It’s marvelous for all sorts of reasons—Rowell handles issues of gender, class, race, abuse, and love so perfectly—but the descriptions of her protagonists slowly falling in love, largely over the course of the daily ride to and from school on a hostile bus, struck me as so true. Maybe it’s because I remember the thrill of sitting next to a beau, shoulders leaning in, hands entwined unless periodically stealing away to cup a knee. Eleanor and Park don’t even share their first kiss until roughly halfway through the book, and yet the sexual tension and the desire they feel as they joyously discover their mutual interest leap off the page.
One of the things that makes Eleanor & Park work so well is that Eleanor narrates a chapter, and then Park does the next one; back and forth we go (much like the Song of Songs), seeing them each from their own perspective and then from that of their beloved. This narrative strategy captures the pathos and incredulity of these first-time paramours, but it also offers a powerful counterargument to those throughout history who fear that sexual desire and passion lead us inward—away from love of God and neighbor—who fear that attending to our desires and passions will make us selfish and hedonistic.
Eleanor loves the color of Park’s skin, his voice, and his eyes. He loves her red, curly hair, and the sight of her figure—the one she thinks is too squat and curvy—makes him blush and dream. Part of falling in love is coming to see another person; part of falling in love is allowing another to see you.
But that seeing and being seen, and the vulnerability and attentiveness they require, are not just factors of a singular, committed, long-term love. Some Christians like to claim that all sexual intimacy outside of marriage will necessarily feel cheap and damaging, but many of us know that that’s simply not true. The grace of being seen and known, of holy attentiveness to a partner, is possible, I’d argue, in any just and loving action toward another, and it’s part of what makes sexual encounters—or good ones, anyway—so pleasurable.
Their desire is particular; it is not for just anyone, it is for this man, this woman. They only have eyes for each other.7
The desire to be seen and known, the desire met for Eleanor and Park and our biblical lovers, is not merely the stuff of literature and poetry. That desire is wrapped up in our very human need to be authentically ourselves and to be accepted as such.
Perhaps equally widespread among teenagers and young adults is a fear that we will never have this desire fulfilled. A good number of my survey respondents wondered at some point in their lives if they would find someone who would desire and appreciate them. Whether they were too skinny or too fat, too acne prone or shy, “one of the guys” or “not a guy’s guy,” they worried desperately they’d never be the object of anyone’s desire.
I was certainly among those worriers for a number of years. I was convinced no one would ever see me as desirable, could ever possibly see beyond the giant glasses and crazy hair, the flat chest and the shyness. Teenagers tend to imagine that everyone is always focused on them, and particularly on their faults or vulnerabilities. They fear everyone is always talking about them, having judgmental opinions about their most personal attributes (what psychologists call “false audience consensus,” the false belief that their behavior is the focus of others’ concerns and attention). What’s worse, no small number of tortured teenagers has asked over the ages whether it’s better to go through life unnoticed, or to be seen for who you are, and judged.
I lived with the same question as that first real relationship began. When it became apparent that this boy was going to want to see and/or touch my barely-As sooner rather than later, I alternately panicked and dared to dream. It seemed as though that sort of touch would feel good . . . when we kissed I wanted nothing more than for him to pull me closer and caress me. But I was deathly afraid his hands would finally traverse my torso, only to recoil in shock and horror on realizing how empty the cup of my light blue Victoria’s Secret bra really was. Is it better to be overlooked or known and deemed undesirable after all?
When the moment—the specifics of which are lost to history and memory—finally came, none of my fears were realized. Instead of being horrified by my body, he was delighted to be invited to access it. While I had feared rejection, that night and on many more that followed it, I felt appreciated and altogether desirable, not in spite of who I was, but because of it.
Theologian Paul Tillich once preached a sermon called “You Are Accepted!”8 No matter how unacceptable—how deficient, or shame-filled, or faulty, or fallible—we feel sometimes, the fact of God is that we are accepted. Each and every one of us. In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the Christ, we see that the estrangement we experience from God and one another and ourselves can be, even is, overcome. We’re not separate from God; we’re reconciled. We’re accepted. “Acceptance” is late-1940s psychological jargon for grace.
There’s a grace, then, in sexual intimacy that’s mutually pleasurable. There’s grace in deeming someone worthy enough to see and know you; there’s grace in being seen by someone in a new way . . . and maybe even coming to see yourself in a new way. There’s grace—and passion and delight—in coming to know another’s scent, another’s taste, another’s body; and to see oneself as having a particular, and beloved, scent, taste, and body.
That grace is not merely something we want, though there’s nothing inherently wrong with desire; it’s not just about meeting a fundamental human need, though certainly meeting fundamental human needs ought to be of critical importance for Christians. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, suggests that this grace, the body’s grace, is critical in helping us to understand the character and nature of the Triune God.
Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted. The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ’s body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God’s giving that God’s self makes in the life of the Trinity. We are created so that we may be caught up in this, so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.9
Three centuries earlier, John Wesley spoke of how Christians might experience grace, and might help others to experience grace. He did not list adolescent make-out sessions or sex of any sort as a means of grace. His list included things like regular participation in Holy Communion, daily study of the Bible, and working to serve the poor and imprisoned. But I like to think that if Wesley had lived just a few centuries later, he might have at least considered including kissing or teenage making out or sex, because he, like Williams, considered grace to be a powerful force for transformation, of individuals, society, and the world.
The means of grace Wesley described don’t earn us salvation or teach us anything new or different about God. But they can be channels of grace, ways through which we experience God’s love and life. So: never let it be said that taking Communion will save you, or that kissing your girlfriend will teach you something of God you cannot learn otherwise.10 It’s not the means themselves that make a difference; consuming bread and grape juice, even nicely prayed-over bread and grape juice, will not magically or suddenly change your life. But it can be a way of experiencing the presence and love of God, without which, in Wesley’s words, the love of God waxes cold.11 Visiting people in prison, caring for the poor, singing and worshipping in community, sharing a common meal: all of these can help us and help others to experience the transformative power of being seen and desired by God as significant and wanted. So, too, can sexual interaction be a way of experiencing grace.
UP UNTIL NOW, I’ve been hoping to get at what makes sexual desire a wonderful, even holy, experience by intentionally talking about sexual activity that is not as intimate as intercourse, but also pretty enjoyable. At this point, however, a turn to discussing “virginity” and what we tend to think of more broadly as “sex” can reveal the ways we are able to hold multiple types of desire in tandem and to consider if any of those types are more or less life-giving.
Over the course of that first romantic and sexual relationship, I experienced the grace of having affection lavished on me, of feeling significant to someone in a new way. I loved that boy because he was funny and smart, and had both charisma and these beautiful forearms. But I also loved him because of what he saw in me, someone smart and funny and lovely and desirable. Someone with no boobs to speak of, but with big blue eyes and clear skin.
My first love was my first in a number of categories; but he was also the first in a category that, at sixteen, I didn’t know existed.
Once we’d been together for six or eight months, we had the opportunity to spend some time together without his mother in the next room. The promise of privacy, real actual privacy outside of a car, raised a question. Would we “have sex”?
For me, for us, that meant intercourse. Though I’d never describe my family or church culture as particularly concerned with virginity and its associated virtues, in the milieu of teen movies and health class in which I existed, sex meant heterosexual intercourse. As my first relationship deepened, as I had my own experiences of “will they or won’t they,” I grew increasingly irritated by the way TV shows and movies showed teen love and conversations about sex. Couples seemed forever to be asking questions of whether to “do it” or not after a few closed-mouth kisses and the placement of the boy’s hand gingerly on the outside of her shirt. There was no natural progression! No sign that their sexual relationship was related to a shared intimacy, even when the couple was purportedly in love. No demonstration that if she wasn’t comfortable with his hand in her bra, she was certainly not going to be comfortable with anything involving genitalia. Joey and Pacey should never have been talking about sex if they couldn’t even manage to discuss second base.
There was also the sticky little problem in all those portrayals of young women uninterested in sexual pleasure; that was the guy’s primary concern and pursuit, while she wanted love and affection. I love Carole King, but the progeny of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” are myriad and unhelpful. Sexual activity of any sort in these narratives seemed transactional: What would she sacrifice of her purity in order to get affection and love?
I wouldn’t continue to be so bothered by these scripts if they didn’t play themselves out both in wide social surveys and in the much smaller survey I ran for this book. Many women had sex for the first time for love, or because their partner wanted it, or because they had made up their minds that they were old enough and ready—in a rite of passage sort of way—but not because they desired it for themselves. Not because their partner had awakened the desire to share this powerful experience of vulnerability and grace.
I worry about those who have sex too young, because sex renders you vulnerable; because the younger you are, the less likely you are to use protection; because the younger you are, the less likely sex is to be a loving, mutually pleasurable thing, and the more likely it is that sex is a risk-seeking behavior. But even more than age, I worry about those who embark on sexual encounters or relationships devoid of any real desire to do so; who become sexually active for reasons other than desire for pleasure, grace, or intimacy.
Social scientists writing about people’s self-reported reasons for having sex for the first time talk about the confluence of several factors: affection for their partner or an expression of love, curiosity about sex, and desire for physical pleasure all constituted various motivations. So did peer or partner pressure, or the influence of drugs or alcohol. Then there are those whose first sex was forced. But there are other, less nefarious, external influences: whether or not the individual had a partner, or unsupervised time with that partner—was there more than one parent living in the home?—or was considered physically attractive by self and others. Did the person have a vision of his or her future that would be disrupted by pregnancy or disease? Did the individual have a religious belief system or family understanding that exerted “social control”—i.e., that suggested sexual contact was to be avoided? Somewhere in the meeting of all these factors lies the probability that someone will have sex.
When I asked my survey respondents why they had sex for the first time, almost no one gave just one answer. There was dispute about what constituted sex, and what those first experiences ought to be called. “Loss of virginity” is fraught, because “virgin” carries a host of differing connotations and ascribed social values for women and men, and because it implies a loss of innocence, or purity, while many experience becoming sexually active as a gain—of pleasure, of connection.
For straight, suburban me, at sixteen and as I still understand my own story, virginity was about vaginal intercourse; for many others, though, it’s defined differently. Most straight respondents to my survey calculated their number of partners the same way, and referred to their loss of virginity the same way I do. A smaller number of respondents included oral sex in their definitions. But a number of gay respondents suggested that their first sex occurred while giving or receiving oral sex, or simply touching each other’s genitals, or even lying naked together exploring their partner. The decisive criteria for them was physical intimacy, not penetration. Many other LGBTQI respondents (and some straight ones) defined a sexual partner as someone present and involved in your achievement of an orgasm. (Hands go up from the crowd of straight women protesting that this criterion would shift their partner count dramatically.) A lot of people wholeheartedly rejected the use of the term “virginity” at all. (In some social science literature, this moment is referred to as “sexual debut,” a phrase I sort of like, but which calls to mind some sort of strange debutante ball.)
A number of wonderful things were revealed in these responses to the survey, but the most critical to this conversation lies herein: sex is not easily defined; it defies boundaries and calls for interpretation and the assignation of meaning by those engaged in any given encounter. This is worth noting because having nurturing, good Christian sex is not about drawing lines in the sand: it is not about assigning different sexual acts to “bases” and forbidding some while permitting others. The overwhelming emphasis of certain segments of our culture, for example, on first, the importance of protecting one’s virginity, and second, the utter normativity of heterosexual intercourse, has contributed to a surprisingly large percentage of teenagers who don’t consider oral or anal sex to be “real” sex or challenges to their “virginity.” And thus they engage in those things without understanding anything about vulnerability, mutuality, or the spread of sexually transmitted infections. That can’t be what we’re hoping for as we try to make sense of our experiences and guide others toward faithful practice.
Now, sixteen-year-old me couldn’t have told you about the social construction of virginity, but it wasn’t something I was overly hung up on. I rounded some bases more quickly than others, and when the question of “going all the way” arose, I looked around at my peer group and realized that I wouldn’t be the first to cross the plate. One of my girlfriends had sat her parents down and given them the talk when she was ready to start sleeping with her boyfriend. Another had been raped. One “lost her virginity” while she had her period, and a tampon in, so there was great debate in our circle as to whether or not that actually counted. He had “put it in,” but he couldn’t have gotten very far.
I had never imagined waiting until I was married to have sex. Though the curriculum our congregation used suggested that sex was best in marriage, I knew faithful adults, people I admired, who had had sex before marriage. Also, I did not intend to marry immediately; I could not even begin to imagine getting married. I knew about various forms of birth control, and my mother had always told me that, when the time came, if I needed to come to her for help getting it, I could. (She did not imagine I would come seeking it in high school, however.) Sixteen seemed to me then as good an age as any; Brenda on 90210 was sixteen (even though all the actors on that show looked at least twenty-five). I loved this boy, and he loved me, and we knew how to make each other feel good—loved and appreciated and pleasured—both physically and emotionally. But when the moment came, I decided I wasn’t ready after all. I wanted to . . . but didn’t feel ready.
I just knew it in my gut. This wasn’t the time.
Physical, sexual desire, it turns out, can be overcome.
Maybe it was because my mom had told me how much harder it is to end a relationship once you’ve had sex. Maybe it was because I was scared of the pain I anticipated. It wasn’t fear of disease or pregnancy, because I attended a wonderful public high school with a mandated health class in the days of the Danger Zone and factual information about the effectiveness of condoms.
Whatever the reason, I changed my mind. And my first love respected that. We even dated a while longer and never really had the conversation again. I wasn’t ready then; I wasn’t ultimately ready for three more years, several “almost, but not quite” partners later.
By the end of our relationship I wasn’t substantially more mature than I had been when he first showed up with Hootie and hot chocolate. But I had learned that sex wasn’t just a rite of passage. However cute the soccer player from English class was, kissing him to get that first kiss over and done with, devoid of the actual desire to feel his lips on mine or to know him more deeply, wouldn’t have felt right, any more than sleeping with this boy when something unidentifiable in my gut urged me not to would have.
IN RETROSPECT, I am so glad that I did not sleep with anyone in high school; those relationships were formative enough as is. But I think one of the reasons I waited (such as the waiting was) was because the choice was mine to make.
There are those who believe that our bodies and culture will always lie to us, but that God is clear about what is right in every circumstance regarding our sexuality.12 In a culture that, today, seems far too often to suggest that women’s and girls’ bodies are for assaulting, I hear that. And as a once hormone-addled teen, I know that our desires ought not always be allowed to trounce on or ignore other voices within us. Again, as Christine Gudorf suggested, sexual pleasure is a good among many goods.
I remain unconvinced, however, that God is clear about what is right in every circumstance regarding our sexuality. We’ll explore sexual ethics and varied ways of interpreting the Bible in the next chapter, but it should be obvious that “clear” is the last word that should be used to describe the intersection of our faith, the will of God, and our desires in context.
I give thanks and praise that I got to grow into sexual activity the way that I did, over time, with peers and partners who desired and cared for me, as I did them. Choosing what felt right and good, safe and exciting, wise and a little foolish, over and over again in each encounter taught me all the right lessons. They did not always stick. By the time I did “have sex” for the first time, I did it for a handful of reasons, only some of which were good. The boy was charismatic, but the relationship was shallow; we had a pretty impressive physical chemistry, but it was clear we lacked long-term compatibility. Very clear. Still, those sweaty Boston nights will get you . . .
We didn’t really intend to sleep together, but then one night we argued at a party, and, well, made up. For the first time in all my years of making out, my body seemed to be craving that final step forward. My desire had always been sated prior to getting there; that night, I’m not sure. Between the heat and the alcohol and the reconciliation . . . I was a month shy of twenty. I think I thought I was ready. I think that I probably was. It felt amazing, which surprised me, but may well have had to do with the fact that my party attendance had rendered me very relaxed.
Unsurprisingly, once we consummated our summer fling, the shallowness of our relationship became evident in short order. I had some expectations, maybe, of how we’d talk about it. He, who had had a single prior partner, perhaps felt guilty for this inadvertent and certainly unpremeditated “deflowering.” We never talked about it; we never talked again, not until a week before graduation, at the senior week clambake. Instead, my roommate walked me to the Planned Parenthood to get some advice, and then we road-tripped to Bar Harbor.
Desire is a complicated thing. Our bodies can encourage us to pursue things our reason might eschew, but this is an inner conflict. A divided self. Our desires come from within. Our bodies are not forever lying to us, are not evil-tending entities to tamp down and contain until we can safely unleash them into the proper constraints of holy matrimony. Our bodies are us. We are human creatures, which means we are body and soul, made in the image of God, made with bodies. The key profession of our faith is that God was not against taking on a body, and so did! God came to live among us in Jesus Christ (Philippians 2:6–8, among others).
Neither, then, is human life about protecting ourselves and striving for security and certainty. That’s certainly not what Jesus did. Sebastian Moore locates our confusion about the nature of suffering (for a long time believed to be deserved as punishment for indulging our desires) and desire within the last part of Jesus’s life. The theologian suggests that Christians have too often interpreted the meaning of the cross thusly: we suffer for following our desires, whereas Jesus suffers not for following his desires, but for following the will of God.13 But that’s all wrong, according to Moore.
The truth is surely that Jesus does suffer for following his desires. That is what the cross is all about. His desire, totally liberated toward union with God, totally resonant with God’s will, draws upon him the vengeance of an unliberated and fearful world. And he draws us to follow him on this via crucis, this way of liberated desire in an unliberated world.14
Moore goes on to name those who are “sufferers for undenied desires . . . who speak for the desires of the oppressed millions . . . men and women who have dared to desire.” He’s thinking of Gandhi and Mandela and King. But all of us, he continues, are called to this: not to deny our desires, but to attend to them, to ask what it is that we want from this life. In attending to our desires, we can separate out free will from compulsion. And, we hope, over time we can come to be so much a part of the life of God that our desires will be in line with those of the divine.
Taking up our cross to follow Jesus is not about living in fear of accidental pregnancy or even about protecting ourselves from heartbreak. When he exhorts his followers to take up that cross in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells them, “All who want to save their lives will lose them. But all who lose their lives because of me will save them” (Luke 9:24, CEB).
Jesus didn’t come to live among humanity so that we could live our lives afraid of ourselves, our bodies, and others. Jesus came that we might have life—even pleasure—and have it abundantly (John 10:10).
In my high school boyfriend’s den, I experienced desire as a means of grace; in my college apartment, it was considerably less holy, but an important experience nonetheless. The former was, I think, my introduction to a part of the abundant life I’d only read about: being seen and known, appreciated and valued, given pleasure and care. On that hot Boston summer night, I followed my desires to their natural end; I listened to my body. What I didn’t manage was to listen to both my body and my mind together. That takes a little more practice. And, whether our “firsts” came when we were younger or older, for reasons good or bad, the work ahead lies in learning to recognize our desires and examining how they fit (or fail to fit) into a vision of the abundant life. How we rightly become like those who “dared to desire,” how we pursue that life abundant in ways that are holy, and loving, and just; in ways that fulfill the commandment to love God, self, and neighbor, is the work of sexual ethics, which we turn to next.