Making Sense of Sex: Responsible Decision Making for Young Singles

By Michael F. Duffy

Having sex can be a loving and delightful experience, but it can also be emotionally, physically, and spiritually devastating. Many singles struggle to sort out how to make their own sexual experiences physically and emotionally healthy ones. This book can help. Duffy offers a thoughtful guide to sexual decision making for single twentysomethings, exploring ten issues readers should consider when deciding whether and when to have sex. Appropriate for non-Christians and Christians alike, Duffy's work is as relevant to those who have already had sex as it is to those who are considering it for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781611641004

Michael F. Duffy

Michael Duffy is Professor of Theological Studies at Hanover College in Indiana, where he teaches a popular course on sexual ethics. He is the author of The Skeptical, Passionate Christian (WJK).

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Introduction

Some years ago, I received a postcard from a friend. It was a photograph of a huge fireworks display; the other side contained only her name and return address and my mailing address. It took me just a few seconds to realize what she was telling me: she had just had sex for the first time. She had always been adamant about remaining a virgin until she was sure the right person came along. Now, well established in her career and planning her wedding, she believed she had found the right person and the right time. The fireworks card was her way of having a bit of fun with an important moment in her life.

Fun and important are two pretty good words with which to begin our exploration. Sex is fun. Under the right circumstances, it can be a delightful sharing of intimacy and pleasure with another person. It is a gift—from God or nature, however you want to think about it—that can unite us, make us laugh, give us joy, bring us a sense of peace, take us out of ourselves for a while, give us intense physical pleasure, allow us to give another person pleasure and delight, give us the opportunity to express and receive love, enhance our self-esteem, let us revel in touching and being touched, and help us to experience trust and vulnerability. Sometimes, it can even bring us the gift of children.

Sex is also important. Even in those admittedly too-frequent times when we choose to have sex under the wrong circumstances, so that we end up with more pain than pleasure, more sorrow than joy, sex is an important part of our lives. Sex brings together our intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and physical sides more clearly and intensely than most of the things we do. Our choices about whether, when, and with whom to participate in sexual activity define who we are in our eyes and others’ eyes more deeply and readily than many other aspects of our behavior. Sex shapes the nature and quality of our relationships with certain other people, and from the point of view of those who believe in God, it can also shape the nature and quality of our relationship with God.

As enjoyable as sex can sometimes be and as important as the sexual dimension of our lives is, sex can also be complicated, and it is not unusual for us to find ourselves wondering whether and when to participate in it: Should I have sex with my girlfriend of three months? Should I hook up with this person I just met? Should my fiancé and I wait until we are married to have sex, or should we have it now? This book is intended to help you answer these kinds of questions for yourself. It is a book about how to make good sexual decisions, especially when those decisions involve sexual intercourse.

No Preaching Allowed Here

Let me promise you something: I am not going to preach to you. Over the last few years, I have had conversations with many current and past students, with Facebook friends and friends not on Facebook, and with colleagues and various professionals about what should be included in this book. Echoing through almost all of these conversations was one repeated request: Whatever issues you address, please don’t tell us what to do or tell us what someone else wants us to do. Instead, write in a way that enables the reader to make up her or his own mind about the issues. I have tried to honor that request in this book. I am not going to try to tell you how to think or live. If you are looking for a book that will tell you what to do and what not to do and not challenge you to think for yourself, the book you are now holding is not for you. There are many people and resources that would be more than happy to tell you how to behave sexually; I am not one of those people, and this book is not such a resource. On the other hand, if you are looking for a book that, while taking an occasional stand on important issues, tries primarily to help you to think clearly and decide well about your own sexual life, I think you will enjoy the pages ahead.

Is This Book for Me If … ?

Is this book for me if I have already had sex? Definitely. After all, having sex before, whether once or a hundred times, does not mean that you need or want to have sex today. The decision is still yours to make, whether it is with a new person or with the same person as before. My goal here is not to convince you to start or to stop having sex, but simply to support you in making your own best decision.

Is this book for me if I am not single? Yes. The word single has at least two different meanings these days. It can refer to or describe those of us who are not married or not in a committed and intentionally lifelong relationship. It can also describe those of us who are not in any romantic relationship; some of my twenty-something friends would not consider themselves to be single if they had a boyfriend or girlfriend. In this book, I am using the word single in the first sense. Most anticipated readers will not be in committed, lifelong sexual relationships with their current partner. Yet many concerns related to sex and sexuality are not solved simply because one has made such a commitment, so I do think anyone can find it helpful to ponder the kinds of issues related to life and faith that this book addresses. You might also have siblings, children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and friends for whom these issues are currently or soon will be important, and it might be worth pondering some of these issues as you look for additional ways to support them.

Is this book for me if I am not of legal age? Yes and no. States have made judgments about when sex is and is not legal, and nothing I say here should be taken to encourage anyone to engage in illegal behaviors. In particular, I am not here to encourage anyone who is not of legal age to have sex. At the same time, even if you are younger than the intended audience for the book, you might find something in it that helps you to live your life well and think about your future; that seems to me to be a good thing.

Is this book for me if I am gay or lesbian? Yes and no. I do not believe that the mere fact that a sexual encounter or relationship is between people of the same gender is an argument against its appropriateness. You will find many of the issues here (about consent, caring for others, promises, motivations, and power, for instance) to be relevant to your process of sexual decision making no matter what your sexual orientation may be. At the same time, I have made the purely practical decision to focus the book on heterosexual vaginal intercourse and issues that emerge out of the heterosexual orientation with which I am experientially familiar.

Is this book for me whether or not I am a Christian? Yes. One of the things that must be considered as you ponder your sexual life is your faith tradition, if you have one, for it is likely to be the source of many of your values and ways of seeing the world. For that reason, and because my own faith commitment and the faith commitment of most of my expected readers is Christian, some of the discussions here will draw on the Christian tradition, and some are specifically designed to be matters of Christian discernment. At the same time, the majority of this book makes no reference to religious faith of any kind, and Christians and non-Christians alike can profit from its explorations. If we human beings are truly going to live together well and peacefully (and it is difficult to imagine any more worthwhile goal), then we must be able to talk together about common, key aspects of our lives. I hope to speak here a language that is common to as many of us as possible.

Is this book for me if I already know my answer to the question of whether I should have sex? Yes. Some of you know that you are not going to have sex until you are married, and some of you have decided that you are going to have sex whenever it is available. Yet, despite making some very firm decisions, many of you have reconsidered your decisions more than once. None of us knows what life is going to bring our way in the coming weeks and years. Since we can never truly consider ourselves to have decided much of anything for all time, an attitude of continued openness to reflection seems most likely to help us to live well in a world where new insights, arguments, experiences, and innovations come our way frequently.

A Word about Me

I hope those quick questions and responses convinced you to keep reading. Perhaps a word about me is now in order. I am a white male whose sexual orientation and practice is and has been heterosexual. I was single for the first thirty-three years of my life, married for a decade, single for half a decade, in a committed relationship for a few years, and I am now married again. In my professional life, I spent thirteen years as pastor of a congregation and then as a college chaplain, and I have spent the last fifteen as a college faculty member. My interest in issues of sexuality has been both professional and personal; you can trust that I have addressed in my personal life, and as a pastor and teacher, the vast majority of the issues I am inviting you to address here. My continuing concern for our lived sexuality has led me to attempt the crazy feat of writing a book on sex.

As part of my promise not to preach to you, I am not going to say a lot in this book about my own views on sex. Instead, I am interested in giving you the tools to figure out what you think and how you choose to live. Just so you don’t waste any time wondering whether I have a hidden agenda, though, let me say one thing: I believe sex can be morally appropriate inside and outside of marriage, and that it isn’t always appropriate in either of those contexts. I will remind you of this later in the book.

Our Main Question and What It Means

This book’s main question, stated from your point of view, is, Should I have sex? Two of the words in that question are especially important. The first word is sex. In this question and most of the time in this book, the word sex refers to heterosexual vaginal intercourse. Many of the issues discussed here also illuminate other sexual practices, but intercourse in this sense is the sexual issue that comes up more than any other in my conversations with single twenty-somethings and is worth sustained attention. Indeed, focusing our attention in this way will enable us to make greater progress than if we were trying to cover a wider range of behaviors.

The second crucial word is should. We use this word in a number of different ways. Compare what we mean when we say, Should I use this fork for my salad? and Should I tell my friend the truth about his chances for getting this job? Understood in a typical way, the first is the should of etiquette (e.g., what is the proper fork to use for salad in a formal eating situation?), and the second is the should of morality (e.g., is it right, or is it wrong, to treat another person in this way?). At the heart of this book is the moral question Should I have sex? To ask the same thing another way, Is having sex in this situation the right way to treat the other person and the right way to treat myself? Or, to be more formal, Under what conditions is sexual intercourse morally justified?

In a classroom setting, I can often feel the tension level rise when I start using terms such as should, morality, justification, and the associated ideas and arguments. Such language makes us uncomfortable much of the time, as it is often used in both judgmental and divisive ways. This is not the aim of moral reflection, however. The aim of moral reflection is to help us to discern how to treat one another and ourselves as we struggle to live well and live together in this confusing and uncertain world. So when I use the shorthand question Should I have sex? I mean to be asking whether, in a holistic way (emotionally, physically, spiritually, intellectually), having sex in this situation (with this person, in this relationship, in this way, etc.) contributes to our well-being at least as well as any of the alternative actions open to us. To reflect on this question is part of what it means to aim to live a moral life.

I will sometimes write about sex being morally appropriate or morally justified. To say something is morally appropriate is simply to say that it is, under these circumstances, a right thing to do. It may not be the only right thing to do (after all, you don’t have to choose to have sex in a given situation), but it is right. It is, to use slightly more formal language, morally permissible. Similarly, to say something is morally justified simply means we can offer good reasons for doing it; it is a right action, and we can support it with reasons and arguments that would be generally accepted by rational, faithful, morally engaged people.

So in raising the question of whether to have sex, we are asking a question about the moral life and looking for good reasons and arguments to back up our response. Any two of us might well disagree on the answer, but if our reasons and arguments are well made, we will understand one another’s position. In addition, where one of us is clearly being more rational and faithful than the other, the person with the poorer arguments may be led to change his or her mind. This process, of articulating and modeling the best moral position we can, continuing to explore other possibilities, and adjusting our point of view when better views are revealed, helps us to develop morally and spiritually and contributes to our living well and peacefully together.

Throughout this book, you will find that I speak of having sex as the result of a decision, even a rather complex one. You might disagree. After all, sex is often seen as something that just happens. When sex does happen as the result of a decision, that decision often takes a few seconds or a few minutes, which is nowhere near enough time to read this book. The notion that sex is a more complex decision for some than for others certainly seems correct. I have spoken with people who spent many months thinking carefully about their religious traditions, their upbringing, and their personal values before having sex for the first time or with a new partner. I have also spoken with many whose participation in sex is much more spontaneous. I am assuming in this book that most of the time when we think carefully about moral issues, we end up acting more in accordance with our long-term well-being than when we act more spontaneously. I am assuming that quick moral decisions, just like other quick decisions in our lives, are more likely to be ones we regret and come to consider to have been wrong than those decisions to which we give more time and effort. If that assumption is correct, then, in the long run, spending some time thinking about our lives, including the question of whether we are going to have sex with some particular person, pays off for us and for others.

Puzzle Pieces

I remember sitting around my grandmother’s kitchen table with her and other family members, decades ago, doing jigsaw puzzles. In a similar way, many of us, when faced with important life issues, spread the pieces out on a table in front of us in order to try to fit them together into a solution. Sometimes we do this metaphorically and sort through things in our heads, and sometimes we spread actual lists of pros and cons on the table in front of us and attempt to assemble them in a satisfactory way. One of the more complex puzzles we face as human beings is whether to have sex with a particular someone else. It is a complex puzzle because the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual pieces can all swirl together to make the process both exciting and frustrating as we try to decide what we think, what we feel, and what we will do. Just as many people gathered around a table can contribute pieces to the jigsaw puzzle solution, we can factor into our sexual decisions the guidance, instruction, commands, demands, suggestions, and pleadings we receive from society, family, and peers. In the end, though, the group does not make the sexual decision; we must make up our own minds and take our best shot at a puzzle solution. I hope to illustrate, in the pages ahead, how we can solve the sometimes life-altering puzzle of whether to have sex, for the first time or the thousandth, in a random hookup or a committed relationship.

In the first section of this book, I will identify and explore ten puzzle pieces that can fit together in a number of different ways to answer the question of whether you should have sex. Each one of these pieces is many-sided, and the shape of each piece can change, quite unlike the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which are static and can fit together in only one way. The invention of the pill, for example, gave quite a different shape to considerations about birth control and its relevance to sexual behavior; this change in the birth-control piece meant this piece fit together differently with other pieces to yield, in the practice of many, a different puzzle solution. As another example, a decision you make about the absence or presence of God in your life might change the shape of one of your pieces in a way that changes your solution to the sexual puzzle. As you make the decision about whether to have sex, gain fresh insights, discover new innovations, come to understand your tradition in new or deeper ways, grow in your relationships, make new choices, or exercise your imagination, you may find puzzle pieces shifting shape and the puzzle having a different solution than it once had for you.

Once the ten pieces have been sorted and examined, and you have had an opportunity to decide where you stand on various dimensions of them, chapter 11 will sketch four different ways you might solve the puzzle. That there are more than four possibilities will be readily apparent to you, but these offerings will illustrate part of the process by which good sexual decisions can be made.

I have spoken about this book in some detail with perhaps a hundred people in the last couple of years. Many of them offered important questions to which I was simply unable to respond in the book’s central chapters. At the end of the book, therefore, I have added my responses to what seem to me to have been the fifteen of those questions that were most frequently asked. In roughly a paragraph each, I will try to point to at least one way to think about the question and its answer.

Finally …

You will be invited to answer questions throughout this book. There are many of them in the text itself, and there are a few at the end of each chapter. They are part of