My Experience With Intentional Extreme Abstinence

summary: I am a religious man who remained a virgin until the age of 25 and refused to touch or even look at a woman sexually. I'm sharing my experience as an alternate perspective, and for the consideration of anyone who hasn't yet had sex.

I was right at that time of life when you first take a serious interest in the opposite sex, when most of your peers haven't had sex yet but there's no peer pressure because it's all new and mysterious. The city I lived in was epidemic with STDs. AIDS was a death sentence in those days, and there was a lot of misinformation, uncertainty, and paranoia about it. The religious right was pushing the narrative that birth control pills were murder, and there were a lot of teen pregnancies in my church. Many of you are familiar with the abstinence movement pushed into schools in the Bible belt over the last several years, it was hard doctrine where I grew up, but few young people were committed to it. As a result of these things, in my community, most of the girls with any prospects in life were very hands off. They had strong boundaries for what they would and wouldn't allow, and were largely in control of most relationships.

I went out formally with six girls, and informally with more than thirty, and it was the most fucked up process. The trend was for a girl to announce she was going out with a guy, kiss him and fawn over him like she was madly in love with him, then dump him the next week and move on to another guy. Popularized by the teen mags of the time, this was supposed to get lots of guys on the hook, so that she had someone to latch onto when she hit the wall. It wrecked me every time. In the church we had all been indoctrinated that humans needed to love and care about one another. I had grown up with many of these young women right alongside me in the same pew, hearing the same message, but then they became callous beyond belief when it came to actual relationships. And their explanations for their behavior were just outrageous, outlandish lies, hypocritical, and not a little blaming.

As it happened, I got set up on a blind date by a guy who wanted to mess with me. He set me up with this homely chick, sight unseen, to try to put me into an awkward position. This girl had never had a boyfriend, and mainly wanted to impress me by telling stale blonde jokes and showing me how good she was at Super Mario 3. She had no fashion sense, no figure, and her laugh was so annoying and crass. I had decided to play along because I didn't want to be on the hook for hurting her feelings. One night we're getting busy (lights out of course), and she isn't saying no, and I suddenly realize I'm about to fuck one of the ugliest girls in the school. And all I could think was, "this is some sort of pussy cartel, where I have to settle for some loser if I'm ever going to get anything for long anyway. We're studded out like steers." It was such a crushing realization, and the opposite of every moral I believed in. I zipped up my shit and busted an excuse to leave, and broke it off with Fugsmerelda the next day. And she spent the next three years of her life trying to get even with me for that, for a relationship that had only lasted five days. That wretched experience was the last straw, I decided to go completely abstinent, to not touch a woman or even look at her sexually, and this was how I planned to live my life until such time as they could treat me with respect.

As you have guessed, only the Picassofaces were willing to do that. So I missed all the sexual good times. I missed senior prom, senior trip, summer flings, and four years of crazy university sex. There were a lot of lonely times, and not a few subpar women trying to force their way into my life. My religion was not a help, it was a massive hindrance for this. Evangelical thought of the time forbid masturbation as murder, which created a lot of guilt. The university worship group organizers were actually putting pressure on us to "date" and marry the subpar girls of the group, but even intense kissing could get you blackballed from the group. It was an even more unworkable situation than high school had been, and the only way to win was to not play.

As long as I could fill my time with interesting pursuits, I managed, but the need never left. The loneliness became unworkable around the time I turned 25. I couldn't wait anymore, but I had completely lost any skill with women in the course of avoiding them. Mentally, we were farther apart than ever, at that point I had no idea what they even wanted. My older coworkers didn't give me much hope that things would get better- they were bitter old fucks shifting from cubicle to stripclub and back. I wanted to cut my own dick off and just somehow go on without any of this nonsense. I wanted to go back to a time before puberty, when the everyday was light, and on a good day the best of us could deal with each other like peers and not like prey. But even though I wasn't having sex with any of the women, they were still causing drama in my life, so I figured I might as well collect my whore fee if I'm getting fucked.

So I gave up extreme abstinence and entered a relationship. I was halfhearted about it, wasn't that into the girl, so my first time having sex was a drunken fumble. Even after that, at our best, the sex wasn't worth the drama, mainly because I sucked at it, having no experience. A more experienced woman might have made up for my mistakes, but this was a nerd girl who didn't even know how to give a beej. And this is something I want every church person reading this to know- if you're trying to be oldschool abstinent and save sex for your wedding night, don't think that you'll magically know what to do on that night. You won't, and if you're bad, she might not ever want to give it up for you again. And she WILL expect you to put out like Ron Jeremy on your wedding night, and she'll take it personally if you don't got any game. Figure out what to do before that day comes.

I broke off that relationship and went back to abstinence for awhile, until I met the woman that eventually became my wife. She was a virgin at 24, a fat slacker, but she has a cute face and is a very likable person. Having tried everything else and failed, I decided to just push the relationship as hard as I could. This caused her to cut me off, but a mutual friend showed her my picture and she liked what she saw, so we ended up becoming lovers. I pushed hard for us to get married, and got her to agree within a few months, nobody else was in the picture as you can imagine.

So we got married. In the course of the normal bickering about who has to do what, I tried a few tricks to get her to do what I wanted, which largely failed. Drama was a game no one could win, she would always bring tit-for-tat. And she has the standard "I have to feel good about it" rule that women have, that causes normal conversations to break down. Like I said before, being out of the game for so long, I really didn't understand women, so we got in a lot of fights over nothing.

Then I thought, "I seemed to do best when I pushed the relationship hard, why don't I try that again?" So I started trying to charm her, I'd dance with her, rub her feet, take her to fancy places and be all cuddly. This didn't improve the sex that much, but something started to change in her. One day she wasn't feeling well and we had a tiff, and then she was sick in the bathroom. And I took a washcloth, ran some warm water on it, and reached over and cleaned her up. And that day something dramatically changed. She started looking at me differently. The drama just went away. She started doing what I asked, not everything, but a lot, lost weight even. It was like she finally felt safe to love me like she had always wanted to. Not everything is perfect, but it's a livable marriage, and there are more pros than cons. But best of all, I killed the female sexual partner drama.

Now all I have to deal with is the female mother drama, the female sibling drama, the female mother-in-law drama, the judgmental church female drama, the work female drama, the facebook female drama, the female cat drama, the female neighbor drama, the postmenopausal female neighbor drama, and the female letter carrier drama, so I'm really livin' the dream.

tl;dr: Abstinence can kill your game and stall your sexual prowess while the pressure on you to perform increases. Extreme abstinence won't kill the loneliness unless you lack functioning genitalia. Evangelical religion might fail you when it comes to relationships. If you're looking for a LTR, sometimes doing the counterintuitive thing and pushing the relationship forward can result in a more livable situation than a protectionist strategy. If pushing the relationship worked for you before you got married, try to keep pushing it after you get married. If you're a virgin, pick a direction to go in, either sexual or extreme abstinence, and stick with it, because trying to switch back is horrible. If you're trying to be oldschool abstinent and save sex for your wedding night, don't think that you'll magically know what to do on that night. If you're going extreme lifetime abstinent, get a pet for friendship and maybe one of those foam pussies you can fuck.