Tough luck, old virgins.

Having grown up in the church, I feel like there are two different virginity messages communicated to the unmarried.  Which message you get depends on which age group you fall into.

If you are a teenager, you are bombarded with True Love Waits-type messages.  Youth leaders stress HOW IMPORTANT it is to SAVE YOUR ~MOST PRECIOUS GIFT~ FOR YOUR FUTURE SPOUSE.  This is (I suppose for teenagers) the ULTIMATE ACT OF LOVE.  Even more than actually consummating a relationship as an act of love, the act of saving that consummation is the true mark of love.  The reason that it is SO IMPORTANT to save your Precious Gift That You Can Only Give Away ONCE — did you hear me?  ONCE!!  ONCE ONLY!!  THINK ABOUT THAT before you let some hormone-addled boy with only one thing on his mind separate you from your Calvins — is that many terrible things will befall you if you don’t.  You might get a Loathsome Disease.  (This scare tactic was very popular in the ’80s.)  You will Have Regrets (this can range from good, old-fashioned guilt to terrible lingering memories of someone other than your spouse to learned behaviors, desires, and expectations that your future spouse will not share, therefore paralyzing and ruining your marriage).  Last but not least, and actually not mentioned so often now that birth control, contraceptives, abortion, and lack of societal pressure to marry exist, you might get pregnant.  Bottom line?  TEEN SEX = BAD.  Don’t do it.  Don’t even think about doing it.  And don’t even think about doing it with someone who’s done it, much less actually do it with someone who’s done it, because I think we all know what that makes you, hmm?

However, if you are 20 or older, you hear almost zero admonitions to maintain your virginity (or to remain abstinent in the wake of divorce or being widowed).  It’s like the church either assumes adult singles are so negligible in number that it’s not worth devoting a message to sexual purity after high school, or it assumes that single adults already “know,” so there’s no point in repeating such a message.  I think this is a mistake.  Most single adults live on their own, or at least apart from their parents, and are financially independent.  They are steeped in a culture which expects and often encourages non-marital sex, and their own bodies have been biologically ready to go for at least a decade and oftentimes more.  Who is more likely to give in, a teenage girl armed with teenage fervor for serving the Lord and teenage idealism for the Perfect Romance, or a 29-year-old with her own apartment who finally has a man interested in her after longing for a relationship for the past 15 years?

In addition, if you are a single adult who has managed to remain a virgin, the church’s attitude about marrying another virgin pretty much amounts to “eh.”  All of the True Love Waits admonitions from high school go poof, and you’re stuck with, “Suck it up, you’re not entitled to marry a virgin just because you’re still a virgin, and I can’t even believe you would put virginity on a pedestal.  Who do you think you are?  We’re all sinners in need of redemption.  Hmmph.”  Most single adults in the church, especially those over the age of 30, understand that realistically, there’s a next-to-none chance of marrying a virgin, but it smarts when all your life you’ve heard “Virginity Matters A LOT” messages…only to discover that these messages have an expiration date.  All of the messages about how important it is to wait and to share the Greatest Intimacy Ever only with your spouse suddenly become, “Well, does he (or she) feel bad about it?  Really, REALLY bad about it?  Has this person been keeping their pants on since starting to feel bad about it?  Yeah?  Well, then shut up and settle.”

I’m still trying to reconcile these two messages.  I understand the spiritual and general societal reasons to promote virginity to the youth.  Teenagers are swimming in hormonal upheaval and don’t have the emotional or financial means to deal well with any fallout.  But what about adulthood makes virginity so less important?  Is it better coping mechanisms?  More pragmatism?  Or maybe the church is just quietly accepting that most single adults are no longer virgins and through silence is acknowledging that it would be ~awkward~ to talk about it and make those single adults feel bad about something they presumably have already repented of.

You never know who you’re going to meet in the grocery store.

This post isn’t going to be a cute story about how I met the love of my life in the grocery store because we were standing next to each other in the checkout line, and I made an irresistibly witty comment about a tabloid magazine, and he laughed at the joke and agreed, and I realized he was exceptionally attractive and he noticed that although I was not the most striking woman he had ever laid eyes on, I definitely had the most beautiful Proverbs 31 ~heart~ he had encountered in the past decade, and he asked me to go to the Starbucks stand within the store, and then ten hours later we went home with ecstatic smiles on our faces, giddy that the Lord had seen fit to bring together two like-minded souls in answer to the prayers of myself and twenty of my closest small group girlfriends.  (Seriously, if this story were true, this blog would not exist.)

The unsexy reality is that the likelihood that you are going to meet your future spouse at the grocery store is pretty low.  If you did a survey of married couples, the percentage of those whose story began with meeting randomly at the grocery store would probably be in the very low single digits, if that.  Much like in the past, the majority of couples meet through family and friends.  Probably the next highest percentage meet through some shared activity such as work, church, school, or a hobby.  In comparison to the relative power of the aforementioned methods, which have the advantage of screening by those who know both your and his personality, character, and interests, trolling for a spouse in the produce section at Vons is far from the most efficient method.  You’re more likely to win free fries from the yearly Monopoly promo at McDonald’s.

I suppose it’s true that opportunity lurks at every corner and that luck — er, providence — favors the prepared, but I just can’t counsel women to feel guilty if they make a run to the grocery store looking less than their best.  (If looking less than your best, or at least looking not very good, i.e., like someone trampled over you, is your typical M.O., then we have an issue, but I’ll save that for another post.)