Ever "Kiss Dating Goodbye" and Regret It?

Quote from the article: "Looking back on my decision not to date until I was “ready for marriage,” it is evident that this course has led me to become a bit of a cripple when it comes to approaching women. While putting the brakes on dating was good wisdom for some of my more sexed-up peers, I could really have used a good kick in the pants to throw me into gear."

Article Here

One would think the author of this short piece certainly regretted ever committing to Joshua Harris' book of the same name . . . that is until you read the last few sentences. Which, of course, then leads one to wonder, why the hell this guy even penned a piece about the problems of giving up dating altogether, when he suggests that dating was never his biggest problem to begin with?

That's Relevant Magazine for you. Great topics, great potential, weak punch.

To be honest, I found everything but the last few sentences of this article quite fascinating and probably because it was heading towards something that needs to be address in Christian circles. Namely, that the church (moreso the evangelical church) does a pretty rotten job at preparing Christians to properly handle their sexuality both before, apart from and within marriage. (For the record, I'm pretty much speaking about the evangelical church here because that is my background. While I am an Orthodox Christian I can't speak much to how sexuality is taught in this tradition as I'm too new to the program)

I can't tell you the numerous sexual ideologies i encountered growing up as an evangelical adolescent. "True Love Waits," "Second Virginity" "I Kissed Dating Goodbye," I even had someone tell me at a study session once that the most biblical marriages are "arranged marriages". As it turns out, "True Love Waits," where teens sign a pledge to save their virginity for their marriage partner, really only delayed sexual start-up times by about 18 months. I Kissed Dating Goodbye, as noted from the article above, does a great job at not preparing you to meet and interact with the opposite sex on a relational/marriage level, and arranged marriages....gimmie me a freakin' break!

Now I'm with Scot McKnight when he states that the Bible doesn't teach "no sex before marriage," so much as the Bible teaches that sex IS marriage. So why, for something that is espoused so highly, does the church approach so incompletely? I'll never forget the day I was closing up the ropes course out in Santa Cruz California at my favorite youth camp, when an old friend walked over to converse. He was married only 2 weeks prior and had just arrived back from his honeymoon. We started chatting about how things went over the past week when he told me, "Dude...don't expect everything to work on your first night." No one had ever told me anything like this previously. No one in the church...just no one. Apparently, no one told him either. And what was supposed to be this magnificent, romantic night, as many evangelicals holding out for their wedding night expect that it will be, really just wasn't.

Obviously, i don't need to go into extravagant detail here as I hope what i've written above makes stand alone sense. But seriously, why can't churches of all traditions who espouse and glorify (in a good sense) abstinence until marriage . . . why, WHY, can't they speak more realistically toward the subject? Why not speak to what married couples, singles and divorced individuals can and will encounter and to what singles wonder about what happens in the marriage bed; to what is permissible and what isn't?

Who was it who once said that growing up they were taught that 'sex is a very bad thing that you should save only for someone you love?' I guess we really shouldn't be surprised when those outside of the church see Christianity as just another irrelevant, prudish and repressed religion.