How to Tell Your Children the Truth About Sex
The cover of the May 3,1996, National Catholic Reporter featured a dramatic drawing of a giant, steely eye, looming ominously over a couple's empty bed, with the headline: "Jack and Jill want to marry. Should they tell the priest they've been living together?" The article that followed opened with the story of Sara and Trent. When they gave the same living address to the priest, he responded by saying that, under the circumstances, he could perform only a very simple ceremony with only family members as guests.
After reacting with "anger and disbelief," Sara finally offered to sleep in a separate room, and plans for the big wedding were reinstated. But she felt "humiliated" and "embarrassed for my religion." She "never imagined," she said, that their living together "would present a problem for the priest. The day of our wedding, I hated him."
How is it that a Catholic young adult like Sara would "never imagine" that a priest might view premarital sex as an unacceptable way to prepare for the sacrament of marriage? One reason: Catholic young people may have never before heard a priest speak disapprovingly of premarital sat. Whereas a generation ago Catholics heard lots of sermons about sin, including sexual sin, today that is rare. When our younger son Matthew was in sixth grade, he reported an ongoing debate with several boys in his class who announced that they planned to have sex with their newly acquired girlfriends when they got into seventh grade. "You're not supposed to have sex until you're married, " Matthew kept saying to these classmates (we were grateful to know he had absorbed that message). Finally, one of the other boys, a kid we saw at Mass each weekend with his family, countered: "Oh yeah, well, if you're not supposed to have sex until you're married, how come they never say that in church?"
Clearly, priests and religious educators have a vital role in teaching sexual morality to the young. They must help parents and children understand exactly what Scripture, Church tradition, and the Magisterium teach us about the moral truths central to our faith. How many Catholics of any age know, for example, that Jesus names fornication (sometimes translated "unchastity") as a serious sin, along with "theft, murder, adultery, greed, maliciousness, deceit, sensuality, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, and an obtuse spirit" (Mk. 7:21-23)?
But as the Vatican's recent document The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality reminds us, the primary responsibility for teaching children about sex falls to parents. What can we do as fathers and mothers to help our children appreciate, in the Pope's words, that "sex is the beautiful gift of a good God" and to use that gift as the Gift-Giver intends?
To live a chaste life in the current culture is clearly to be counter-cultural. Three things, we believe, will help young people rise to that challenge. First, they need clear reasons for saving sex for the one relationship it's meant for marriage. A senior at a Catholic college says, "I have failed at chastity because I couldn't answer the question, 'Why shouldn't I have sex?'" Second, young people need strengths of personal character — qualities like modesty, good judgment, self-control, respect for self and others, and moral courage — that will help them succeed in leading a chaste life. Third, they need as many support systems as possible for living chastely — ideally, support from their families, their religious faith (including a personal prayer relationship with God), their schools (which must educate for character in the sexual domain as in all other areas), and at least one friend who has made the same decision.
Early in the conversation with our children, we should address a basic question: What is chastity, and why is it important? Chastity is a necessary human virtue — necessary for all human beings everywhere. Chastity is that virtue which enables us to exercise control over the sexual area of our lives. It enables us to place sexual intimacy and sexual intercourse within their proper context, within the unique, totally committed relationship of marriage. Only within the marriage of a man and a woman can the two inextricably joined purposes of sexual intercourse be fulfilled: the expression of faithful, committed love and the creation of new life.
What happens when individuals and whole societies do not practice chastity? Look around. The evidence continues to mount that our society suffers from a plague of problems stemming from the breakdown of sexual morality: promiscuity; rape (increasing four times as fast as any other violent crime); teen pregnancy; out-of-wedlock births (up from 5% in 1960 to more than 30% today); a million and a half abortions each year (a third of them performed on teenagers); an explosion of sexually transmitted diseases (12 million new cases each year); the destructive psychological consequences of temporary sexual relationships; widespread sexual harassment in schools and the workplace; a rising tide of sexual sleaze in the media; children preoccupied by sex at ever earlier ages; a huge pornography industry; the sexual abuse of children (an estimated one in four girls and one in six boys is sexually abused at least once by age 18); sexual infidelity in marriages; and the damage done to families by many of these problems.
Surveying this moral landscape, William Schickel observes: "Chastity, like honesty, is a civic as well as a personal virtue. When a society loses chastity, it begins to destroy itself." Sex is powerful, capable of producing great good or great harm. (Perhaps the biggest lie the Devil has put over on the 20th century is that "sex is no big deal.") Chastity enables us to control sex and make it a source of happiness, as God intended, rather than of suffering.
With that foundational idea about the power of sex and the need for chastity in place, parents are better able to talk with their children about specific sexual issues. We would like to focus here on five: (1) What is the relationship between sex and love? (2) What are the emotional and spiritual dangers of sex outside a committed love relationship, namely, marriage? (3) What if you've already lost your virginity? (4) How far is too far in expressing physical affection? (5) Why not live together if you're planning to get married?
What to say when kids say, "But isn't sex just a natural way to express your love?" Sixteen-year-old Karen (not her real name), a Catholic, told her mother that she and her 18-year-old boyfriend, David, felt they were "ready to have sex." Stunned, her mother said, "But, Karen, sex is meant for love." Karen answered: "But we do love each other, and this is the way we want to express it." The mother later lamented to a friend, "I was at a loss for words. I felt my religion had given me no language."
The mother could have helped Karen think about the meaning of love:
You say that you and David love each other, but what does it really mean to love someone? Love means wanting what's best for the other person. How do you know when somebody really loves you? When that somebody wants what is best for your welfare, your happiness. Not just your happiness at this moment, but in the future as well.
Is sex between unmarried persons really an act of love? Is it truly what's best for you and the other person, now and in the future? What are the dangers? Pregnancy is one. Sexually transmitted diseases is another. A third is emotional hurt, which can last for years after a break-up and is usually more severe if sex was involved. Then there are spiritual consequences — your relationship with God. So ask yourself: Can two people really claim to love each other if they're willing to gamble with each other's health, life, happiness, and spiritual welfare? True love will never put the other in danger of having to face consequences like these, consequences that could change your lives forever. If it's love, you'll wait.
How can we help our children understand the emotional consequences of uncommitted sex? Unfortunately, in most discussions of teenage sex, far less is said about the emotional hazards than about the physical risks. To be sure, we need to talk to kids about the physical dangers. Pregnancy is a life-changing event. Sexually transmitted disease (STD) — and there are now more than 20 STDs — can rob you of your health, your ability to have a baby, and even your life. Condoms (leaving aside the question of the morality of contraception) do not remove these dangers. Condoms have an annual failure rate of 10 to 30 percent in preventing pregnancy because of human error in using them and because they sometimes leak, break, or slip off. Condoms reduce but by no means eliminate the risk of AIDS. Social Science and Medicine (June 1993) reported that a meta-analysis of II different studies found condoms to have an average failure rate of 31 percent in preventing sexual transmission of the AIDS virus. Moreover, other medical studies find that condoms do little or nothing to protect against the two most common adolescent STDs, infecting at least a third of sexually active teenage girls: HPV (human papilloma virus, the leading cause of cervical cancer) and chlamydia (one of the leading causes of infertility), both of which are transmitted in ways that condoms don't stop.
Condoms obviously provide no protection whatsoever against the emotional consequences of sex. And the relative silence about the emotional side of sex is ironic, because the emotional or spiritual dimension of sex is what makes it distinctively human.
When Prof. Carson Daly taught literature at a well-known Catholic university, she says students would often come to see her, ostensibly about a paper they'd written, then would stay to talk, often through tears, about a problem they were having in a romantic relationship. Sex was almost always involved.
Daly comments:
I don't think I ever met a student who was sorry he or she had postponed sexual activity, but I certainly met many who deeply regretted their sexual involvements. Time and again, I have seen the emotional and spiritual desolation that results from casual sex and promiscuity.
No one prepares young people for the effects: the lowered self-esteem; the despairing sense of having been used; the self-contempt for being a user; the embarrassment of having a reputation that puts you outside the circle of people with true integrity; the unease about having to lie or at least having to conceal one's activities from family members and others; the extreme difficulty of breaking the vicious cycle of compulsive sexual behavior; and the self-hatred of seeking, after each break-up, someone else to seduce in order to revive one's fading self-image.
"No one tells students," Daly says, "that it sometimes takes years to recover from the effects of these sexual involvements — if one ever recovers." Sometimes guilt about their sexual past ends up crippling people when they become parents by keeping them from advising their children not to become sexually involved. Says Daly: "Because these parents can't bear to be considered hypocrites, or to consider themselves hypocrites, they don't give their children the sexual guidance they very much need." (Hence the importance of guilt-burdened parents seeking God's forgiveness — for Catholics, through Confession — as a way to gain healing and the spiritual freedom to counsel one's children.)
Young people themselves are often the best witnesses to the emotional pain caused by premature sexual involvement. Listen to a girl, a junior in high school, writing to an advice columnist about how she feels trapped by the sexual relationship she is in. She wants to warn other girls because, she says, "In all my years of reading your column, I've never seen the honest-to-goodness truth about this." She continues:
I truly regret that my first time was with a guy that I didn't care that much about. I'd like to end this relationship and date others, but after being so intimate, it's awfully tough. Since that first night, he expects sex on every date. When I don't feel like it, we end up in an argument. It's like I owe it to him. I don't think this guy is in love with me, and I know deep down that I am not in love with him either.
I realize now that this is a very big step in a girl's life. After you've done it, things are never the same. Sex is not for entertainment. It should be a commitment. My advice to other girls is to be smart and save yourself for someone you wouldn't mind spending the rest of your life with.
Even in these times when many young people are ambivalent about making a commitment to another person, a great many, probably most, still dream of being happily married someday. They would be more likely to save sex for their marriage partner if they knew that the psychological aftereffects of premarital sex can detract from, and even seriously damage, sexual intimacy and happiness in marriage.
Guilt about premarital sex is obviously one potential disrupter of a good sex life in marriage. Another is comparisons: If you have had sex with someone besides your marriage partner, there will be the tendency, sometimes beyond your control, to compare your spouse with previous sexual partners. Sexual intimacy in marriage can also be disrupted by flashbacks — involuntary mental images of one's previous sexual experiences with other, premarital partners. Or premarital sex can lead to boredom with married sex, because before marriage you conditioned your body to respond to the forbidden aspect of sex, no longer present after marriage.
There may also be a lack of trust that comes from knowing that your husband or wife had previous sexual partners, or that you and your spouse were sexually intimate with each other before marriage. Says one wife: "When I think of how Mike and I were sexually involved when I was his secretary, it makes me wonder what he would do now if he met somebody he was very much attracted to." Studies reported over the past decade in the Journal of Marriage and the Family find that persons who are sexually active before marriage are in fact more likely to be unfaithful after marriage.
This, then, is a positive way to frame the idea of waiting: Think of the kind of marriage you want, and the kind of sexual relationship you'd most like to have with your husband or wife. What will make that relationship most free, secure, and fulfilling? Molly Kelly, a Catholic chastity educator who talks to thousands of students each year in both religious and public schools, invites young people to think of how they'd like their wedding night to be: "There is no greater gift that a man and a woman can give each other on their wedding night than the gift of their virginity. And it's a gift you can give only once."
"But what if I haven't saved sex for marriage?" a young person may ask. "What if I've already given it away?" "Start saving it," says Molly Kelly. "Some gifts come with tags that say, 'Do not open until Christmas.' Sexual intercourse is a gift that says, 'Do not open until marriage.' If you've already unwrapped it, you can wrap it up again!"
Although you can't regain your physical virginity, you can regain chastity — a spiritual state — at any time. This is often referred to as choosing "secondary virginity." Says one 17-year-old who took SEX RESPECT, a chastity-based sex education curriculum: "I wasn't a virgin when I started this course, but I intend to choose secondary virginity now. I feel a lot better about myself."
When we give talks about chastity to teens and their parents, we now make a point of beginning by talking about secondary virginity. We acknowledge the likelihood that many young people in the audience may have never had anyone explain the reasons to save sex for marriage, and so may have already engaged in intimate sexual behavior. Judy says: "Trust in God's forgiveness. He loves you with a tender love, more that anyone loves you, and He forgives you no matter what you've done. So tell Him you're sorry — in the Sacrament of Reconciliation if you are Catholic — and forget about the past. Tell God, yourself, and your friends that you are starting over. This will give you a great inner peace."
"How far can you go?" is a question asked by many young people who may believe that sexual intercourse before marriage is wrong but aren't sure about limits short of that. They need clear guidelines. One teenager said she got good advice from her grandmother: "Keep all of your clothes on all of the time." A high school counselor tells students to avoid any behavior that undermines self-control: "If you don't want to drive over a cliff, don't pull up to the edge and race the engine." George Eager, author of Sex, Love, and Dating, speaks to teens in school assemblies across the country and tells them you are going too far when:
• either a guy's or a girl's hands start roaming
• either of you starts to remove clothing
• you are doing something you would not want to be doing around someone you really respect
• you are arousing genital feelings
• you are arousing feelings that reduce your ability to make and carry out an intelligent decision.
The chastity educator Pat Driscoll says simply: "Stop at the beginning of genital arousal. Stop before lust sets in."
Again, young people will find it easier to accept and adhere to these guidelines for sexual restraint when they have a positive ideal before them — the ideal of sexual purity, for example, and the belief that their body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. That, plus prudent habits such as avoiding situations that make them vulnerable to temptation. ("You might want to spend time alone," says Hugo, a college senior, "but don't. The temptation is too much." Adds Tim: "Always keep the door open!")
Finally, what many parents find the hardest question: Why not sleep or live together if you know you're going to get married?
There are, of course, the clear prohibitions of premarital sex from Scripture (in the New Testament, the words of both Jesus and St. Paul) and from Church teaching. Young people should be invited to consider God's Word on this issue and whether they want to risk the spiritual consequences of choosing to live outside His law.
We should also help our children understand the arguments from natural law. There is a moral law, based on human nature, just as there is a law governing physical nature. When we follow the natural moral law, we live in harmony with ourselves and each other. When we act in ways that go against the natural law, we create problems for ourselves and others.
In the natural moral order, what are the natural consequences of having sex? Bonding and babies. This is sometimes expressed as God's "two-in-one" plan for sex: deepening love and making new life. If you have sex with someone you aren't married to, you may very well create or deepen an attachment that ends up being broken. And, even if you are trying to avoid it, you may create a life you aren't ready to assume responsibility for.
To bring home the latter point, we tell young listeners the story of Jack (not his real name), an acquaintance of ours. Jack and his girlfriend Linda lived together when they were in their mid-20s. Even though they were using contraception, Linda became pregnant. Neither believed in abortion, so they had the baby, a little girl named Becky. A year later they broke up, and Linda moved several states away. She found a new boyfriend, and told Jack she didn't want him visiting Becky. Jack says, "I grieve for my daughter. She's three now, and I really long to see her. This is my child, and I can't have a relationship with her." Neither can Becky experience the love of her father. These are very big consequences, ones that Jack never imagined when he and Linda were living together. But that relationship brought forth a new human life — one for whom there was not, as there should have been, a marriage and a family in which she could be loved and raised.
As parents, we should also help our children appreciate the intrinsic meaning of sexual intercourse. When you have sex with someone, you are being as physically intimate as it is possible to be with another human being. The ultimate intimacy belongs within the ultimate commitment.
When you're married, sexual union is part of a bigger union. You join your bodies because you've joined your lives. In body language, sex says to the other person, "I give myself to you completely." Within the marriage commitment, that's really true. By contrast, sex before marriage is lying with your body. It's like saying, "I give myself to you completely, but not really."
The Salesian priest Francois Dufour offers this analogy: How would we react if a seminarian said, "I'm almost a priest, and I'd be happy to hear your confession"? You're either ordained or you're not; you're either married or you're not. Sex before marriage, like a seminarian giving absolution, is pretending.
Another reality is that engagements often break up. About half of the people who get married have been engaged at least once before. In some cases, sex can increase the chances of a break-up. In his book Why Not? Why Is Premarital Sex Wrong?, Thomas Lorimer observes, "Premarital sex often turns couples from lovers into fighters." Says one young woman, "Sex quickly became the center of our relationship. At the same time, new things entered — anger, impatience, jealousy, and selfishness. We just couldn't talk anymore." Robert Blood, in his book Marriage, reports that "in a major study, more engagements were broken by couples who had intercourse than by those who did not, and the more frequent the intercourse, the larger the proportion of rings returned."
In other cases, just the opposite may occur: Sexual involvement can lead a couple into a marriage that should never have happened. John and Kathy Colligan, authors of The Healing Power of Love and Pre-Cana counselors of long experience, report on this phenomenon:
We see many engaged couples who are living together. We find out by talking with them that they have little in common. They don't know each other very well. They haven't talked about their values and goals. But the sexual attraction and involvement are very strong.
When we suggest that they not live or sleep together, that they try to become friends and get to know each other to find out if they're really compatible, they typically resist. They don't see how they can stop having sex now that they are involved. As their counselors, we can see that this is a marriage likely to fail. And time after time, often in just a few years, it does.
Seven different studies, cited in David Myers's book The Pursuit of Happiness, all point to the same conclusion: Couples who lived together before their marriage are significantly more likely to divorce than couples who did not live together. For example, a U.S. survey of 13,000 adults found that those who lived together before marriage were one-third more likely to separate or divorce within 10 years. A Canadian study of more than 5,000 women found that those who lived with their boyfriends were 54 percent more likely to divorce within 15 years of being married. A Swedish study of 4,300 women found that those who lived together were 80 percent more likely eventually to divorce. The facts contradict the widespread notion that living together would serve as a kind of "trial marriage" that would help a couple test their compatibility. If you really want to get to know somebody and find out if you want to spend your life with that person, sex can make that harder, not easier, to do.
Fr. Dufour offers still another reason for waiting that may resonate with many young persons: "At the sacred moment when a couple pronounces their wedding vows," he writes, "they need to be able to do so in perfect freedom; so much so that they should still feel free until they speak their vows to call it off." But if they have engaged in premarital sex, he points out, they are not really free. "From my experience of officiating at weddings, there is something special present at the marriage of those couples who have not slept or lived together. That quality stems precisely from the sense of freedom the couple still possesses."
Ultimately, of course, all the good arguments for waiting may fall on deaf ears if our children are not growing in their relationship with God. On the feast of St. Maria Goretti, a martyr of chastity, John Paul II wrote: "The Christian does not cultivate chastity or any other moral virtue as an end in itself. Chastity is a most noble value if it be turned toward Christ the Lord and made part of the whole context of Christian living. "If our children frequent the sacraments of the Eucharist and Confession, and come to know and love and pray to Jesus as their Lord, Savior, and companion in their daily lives, they will want to live chastely and will have abundant grace to do so. •
Tom Lickona is a developmental psychologist and Director of the Center for the 4th and 5th Rs (Respect and Responsibility) at the State University of New York at Cortland. His wife, Judy, is a homemaker. They give speeches to teenagers and their parents on chastity and respect for life. They are the authors, along with William Boudreau, of a book for teens, Sex, Love and You (Ave Maria Press), on the benefits of saving sex for marriage. © New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706, 510-526-5374.
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