Sex & The Single Life – The Men Saying No.

Sex & The Single Life

The Men Saying No.

by C.J. Claire

I attend a very large church in Chicago and surprisingly it is filled with men and I mean real men.  They come in all shapes and sizes, and many are single and present an attractive package.  Therefore, when my church announced a weekend workshop for singles on The Abstinence Question. 

I couldn’t wait to attend to see if it would turn out to be the usual female-dominated event,  but to my surprise, it wasn’t.  In fact, the female ratio was more 60 to 40 than the usual 90 to 10 in a room filled with over 300 people.  But even more shockingly, a significant number of the men were very verbal about their newfound commitment to sexual abstinence.

I almost fell out of my chair when one of the finest brothers in the church stood up and said he had been abstaining for almost a year because he promised God that the next woman he slept with would be his wife.  However, he went on to express that he had run into some “strange” opposition to his new position with almost every woman he’d met. 

The Amens from other men in the room became almost a quiet hum, as he described the reactions of women to his new stance.   He told about being accused of being gay.  He also voiced his surprise at the number of women in church he’d met, who claimed to respect his stance but later tried to seduce him.

As more brothers spoke about their struggle with abstinence and their efforts to live for Christ, I couldn’t help but notice the unusual silence of female voices in the church. I wondered if any of the women were experiencing the same guilt I was feeling because I could identify with some of the things being said about women with “distrustful attitudes.”  I was certainly one of them.

I’ve been abstaining for over two years now.  Yet, when I met a guy I really thought had potential, I dismissed him as a “brother struggling with his sexuality” when he failed to even have a conversation about sex.  I ended up moving away from him without any explanation.  I was waiting to tell him my position, but I became disturbed when he never asked.  Talk about being confused…I was at the head of the list.

Later, I felt like a complete idiot, when I ran into him at a party, and he confessed he was a born-again Christian who was practicing abstinence and he didn’t know how to tell me.  The funny thing is that I made the same confession to him.  However, he said nothing about reconnecting, and I was disappointed.

At the conference, another man stood and said, “There are many guys who have joined the church and have chosen to live a lifestyle of sexual abstinence, but many will not speak openly about their decision.  However, I have found that most men who have made this lifestyle change will usually tell the woman he is dating or is trying to win favor with, of his decision and why it is important to him.  If you’re a woman who doesn’t believe in abstinence, don’t date him to see if you can break him because you want sex in the relationship.  Men like these are trying to make some powerful changes in their lives and they need our support.”