New research shows that men who abstain from sex before marriage have a good support network that disappears after they wed, leaving them suddenly on their own to deal with the new world of sex.
Men who pledge to preserve their virginity until they marry face a unique challenge. Their marriages open up a whole new, somewhat unfamiliar world of sex, and this may be confusing to some men. So concludes Sarah Diefendorf from her past few years of research on the subject.
Diefendorf has been interested in how men who pledge abstinence before marriage manage sexual temptations before and sexuality after marrying.
“Sexual purity and pledging abstinence are most commonly thought of as feminine, something girls and young women promise before marriage,” said Diefendorf, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Washington. “But I wanted to look at this from the men’s point of view.”
Diefendorf studied a group of 15 men who self-identified as evangelical Christian in their faith. She found that for these men, support groups and those with which they could openly discuss sexual temptation were key managing their pre-marital temptations. However, once they married, these modes of support faded, and the men tended to be left on their own to deal with any confusion or issues with sexuality. Among these were that inappropriate or unwanted sexual temptations did not disappear, but the support in managing them did.
Diefendorf began following the men in 2008 when they were in their late teens and early twenties. They considered sex within marriage to be “sacred” and sex outside of or before marriage “beastly.”
When Diefendorf followed up with these men in 2011 and 2012, 14 had by then married and reported that talking about sex after marriage had become taboo.
“They spend the first twentysomething years of their lives being told that sex is wrong,” Diefendorf said in an interview. “They’re expected to make this transition from the beastly to the sacred, but they don’t really have the tools to be able to do that effectively.”
She said that, in general, churches tend to consider that couples serve as their own support partner and talk much less about sex in supportive ways. Even so, Diefendorf said the marriages were generally happy and stable.
The results of the study were presented on Sunday at the 109th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.
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