Feb 26 Mon
Chastity leads to have the strength to use your sexuality honestly and virtuously, whether you are single or married. Living this virtue trains you in faithfulness, strengthens your will, and leaves you with no regrets. For an unmarried person it means saving marital intimacies for marriage. As one woman said, ‘‘It is sexuality dedicated to hope.”
For the married and the unmarried, it means having respect for the gift of sex. Chastity is a virtue that defends love from selfishness, and frees us from “using” others as objects. It makes us capable of authentic love. In short, abstinence ends in marriage but chastity holds marriage together.
Doesn’t chastity ruin the spontaneity and excitement of romance?
It depends upon what you consider romantic. Real romance is not what you find in a cheap novel. Giving in to one’s hormones at the drop of a hat is not romance. This is lust, and while it may be spontaneous and temporarily exciting, using another person is not romantic. In fact, too many good romantic relationships have been ruined by lust.
Only humans are capable of romance because romance is where imagination and love meet. Sometimes a person’s actions may appear romantic because they are so imaginative and thoughtful, but the actions may be done for the sake of seducing another. This is not romance, because love is absent. Only when purity is present, can one tell the difference between loving romance and selfish seduction.
In fact, romantic moments do not require physical intimacy—and the most romantic couples are the ones who realize this. They know that romance requires respect. You can have lust and passion without respect (as in prostitution), but you cannot have romance without respect. When that loving respect for the other person is present, a man stirs up his romantic creativity not for the sake of getting something from a woman but for the sake of expressing his love to her.
Lust, on the other hand, is boring, because it allows no room for mystery and anticipation. Everything secret is given away. The pure have more passion than the lustful, and it is precisely their passion that gives them the ability to build a greater kind of love. They exercise self-control not because of an absence of passion but because of the presence of love.
When it comes to the topic of sexuality, the media tell us that the most exciting sex is outside marriage. In reality the opposite is true. The world constantly exaggerates telling us that when it comes to sex, everyone is doing it, and the people having the most fun are the wild singles depicted on television sitcoms, while married life is dull and unromantic. However, according to the researchers who published the most comprehensive and methodologically sound sex survey ever conducted in the United States, “The public image of sex in America bears virtually no relationship to the truth.”
Podcast “Lust Is Boring”, Jason Evert
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