What Happens When Evangelical Virgin Men Get Married? This Secular Female Sociologist Found Out.

[Heddi]

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119119/secular-sociologist-studies-evangelical-virgin-men-who-got-married

In 2008, sociologist Sarah Diefendorf spent a year attending a support group for young Christian men who’d pledged to remain abstinent until marriage, getting to know the 20-something bachelors whose lives revolved around an evangelical mega-church in the southwestern United States. Studies have found that teens pledging abstinence through large-scale national programs like True Love Waits and Silver Ring Thing are no more likely than their peers to remain virgins until marriage, but small peer groups may be more successful. “In these small groups, the men would really talk and grapple with issues of sex and sexuality,” Diefendorf, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington, told me. All fifteen men in the group kept their pledges (as far as she could tell). But their struggles with sexuality didn’t end on their wedding nights. Diefendorf followed up with the men five years later, after they were married, to see what kind of issues they were still facing.

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Some years ago, I worked in a hospital in an area that had a large Mormon population, and one of my coworkers and a really good friend was a LDS guy. Let's call him Jake. Jake was pretty open about his religion and was happy to answer any question I had for him, even the ones I found out later were really kind of offensive to ask (things about sacred undergarments, for example).

Jake was in his mid-late 20's when we were working together and he was a class or 2 behind me in Nursing school. He told me about how he and his wife were "set up" thorough their church as teenagers, and were pretty much expected to get married in adulthood. When they went on dates, they had chapperones. THey were never alone. During college, he proposed to her and they decided to get married when they both graduated.

He was pretty open about his ideas of what would happen sexually once they got married. He talked about how difficult it was to marry someone you'd never even kissed or been alone with, and how once they were married, he thought he was going to be getting wonton sex every night. He soon found out his new wife had really no interest in sex at all.

I told him that must really suck (or not) and that's why I'm a big proponent of living together before marriage, and having sex with people before settling down with them. He was quite upset that his expectations didn't meet his wifes, and that they were never ever prepared that this could or would be an issue, or how to even talk about sex and what their expectations for each other were.

I felt really bad for him.