Finally back on this blog: From “Avoid avoid avoid” to “Go go go!”: a holy, funny, passionate love story

Wow, it has been so incredibly long since I last wrote a post on this blog. Not because my fervour for these ideas has in any way cooled down. These last few months have been incredibly busy, even more so than normal. It has all just been a lot. And every so often I would think through a blog post, and plan to write it out…but then busyness would overcome me…again!

So here we are finally!
There has been a really big number of post ideas that have occurred to me over the last few months. Many of them I can’t even remember, if I am honest! Anyway I hope to get back to a routine of regular posting. Yes, I am still quite busy, but thankfully things have eased up a lot!

So here then is the post that finally drove me to find a way to come back to writing these posts! Beware, it is about – ahem sex! (And yet not really in any kind of dangerous or explicit way – if you read on you might see what I mean!)

So I was just mentally thinking through a humorous romantic possibility, and then that segued into a fictional book idea. The key is that it is to be sex-positive without there actually being any sex – even after marriage! I mean the story ends just on the brink of that – so the implication is that our married couple do of course go on to thrive in this area, but it will be completely left to everyone’s imagination.

Anyway this is the premise:
There are two friends, a guy and a girl, perhaps not particularly close, but there has always been something between them, like some kind of understanding. And of course they are both single and both Christians, and they have both quietly checked one another out extensively, but somehow nothing has ever really come of it and they keep dancing around the prospect of a relationship. Until one day our girl, let’s call her -hmm – Tosin! – receives a message – (an email?) from our guy, let’s call him “Guy” in which he spells out very candidly what he thinks about her, and how much he wants to be with her.
[this next bit I really need to iron out, as I can’t think how it might happen in a real quasi-friendship] Crucially, he also spells out how he is sexually attracted to her, going into some detail. Actually, you know what, I change my mind, let’s not call her Tosin after all! Instead, let’s call her hmm Femmie? This happily works both as a corruption of the word “Femme”, meaning woman (or wife) in French to correspond with Guy which is also a real name in French but also sounding a lot like a real Yoruba name, Femi!

So Femmie receives this email from Guy, and she responds in kind. Maybe she takes some time to think about it, maybe she just throws caution to the wind. At any rate, she really goes to town and she feels free to express what she has been yearning for sexually to Guy. And it is a lot! She also expresses how happy she would be if he was the one to fulfil those needs.

Perhaps you can see this punchline from a mile away: it turns out, of course, that Guy did not actually send that initial email! In fact it did not originate from him at all. I need to think of a plausible explanation for why it was sent, I’m leaning towards an email virus. Cue some delicious awkwardness! Guy is of course stunned to receive this very, very candid email seemingly out of the blue from this peripheral friend, while Femmie is mortified. But of course, somehow they manage to work through the awkwardness, and their friendship does not actually collapse as would almost certainly happen in real life, but rather it solidifies into something very close and they do eventually get together romantically – of course, as I’ve already given away the spoilers above! In fact, it is Guy’s maturity and kindness about the whole thing that makes Femmie realise just how special he is.
So they get together and do eventually get married.

Now bear in mind that Femmie has already spelled out quite candidly what she has been looking forward to. So Guy is naturally very excited about their impending wedding night – in fact they both are!
But when the wedding night/honeymoon comes along, Femmie finds to her shock that she is too shy and too embarrassed to do any of it and essentially runs away!

Let me back up here. I hope that anyone reading this has found this as funny as I have done and I have been giggling to myself endlessly while typing it out. But it is based on kernels of truth. The fact is that as Christians, specifically Bible-believing Christians who seek to be obedient to God, many of us avoid pre-marital sex. My personal standards are that I actively avoid any possibility whatsoever of anything becoming sexual with anyone, I avoid even being alone with anyone. I avoid conversations about sex. In fact I meant to pose the question at the top of this post: is it ok for a single woman to even be writing about sex?!
So the attitude to sex before marriage is avoid avoid avoid. Even where it comes to dating I have made a big thing that I don’t believe in pre-marital dating, and conversations before marriage are to be sensible conversations about compatibility etc etc.
This is why I initially named the character after myself because I was actually thinking of a hypothetical scenario involving myself, how I might realistically behave.

What I am about to describe is something that apparently happens to many Christian couples: after avoiding sex endlessly, when they do eventually get married, sex is something that they find incredibly awkward and difficult. After being told that it is wrong for so long, many people struggle to allow themselves to like it.
And please bear in mind that most couples do not share my beliefs about avoiding pre-marital dating. So most couples are not even as extreme as I am!

The problems with Christian sex
What I have described thus far are what I would call the problems with Christian sex. You possibly go from “Avoid avoid avoid” to full intercourse over the course of your honeymoon, or even your wedding night. And then that possibly sets a precedent of sex being difficult, awkward, or painful, or full of shame. Undoubtedly, because human beings are human beings, many Christian couples will be able to get over that and go on to have fulfilling and mutually satisfying sex lives. But anecdotally, many couples do not. If many Christian couples have difficult, unsatisfying sex then that might readily lend itself to the idea that not just pre-marital sex, but even sex itself is inherently bad, or shameful, not something to be enjoyed freely, not something for respectable Christians. And yet most partners would still remain sexual beings. I predict that in such a situation many people would still dream of having passionate and fulfilling sex, but perhaps look outside their marriages for it. This then gives rise to the idea that many Christians (men in particular) engage in transgressive sexual behaviour, looking for the sexual thrill and excitement that they cannot find in their marriages, that they cannot even truly admit that they want. This is ridiculous. Sex was created by God for human enjoyment and pleasure. It is not inherently a bad thing, it is not a bad thing to admit that you like it!

Just yesterday I was watching a YouTube video from a former pastor who has “deconstructed”, or left the faith altogether. He was talking about why evangelical Christianity is so immoral, and the basic gist is that the doctrine of being cleansed from your sin gives licence to people to act however they like. My rebuttal to that is that if you are truly a Christian, if you truly understand salvation, then you should be striving after Christlike character. Yes, God’s grace does exist for those times when we will inevitably slip up. But those slip-ups should be the rare exception, rather than the norm. Furthermore as a Christian I can and I do deliberately look out to associate with fellow Christians who are cultivating not this Christless, insincere attitude to sin, but rather the relentless determination to press in to righteousness, holiness, relentless pursuit of Christ.

That was by the by though! The reason I bring up this ex-pastor and his video is because, as usual, I perused the comments under the video. And one of the top ones that caught my eye was from someone who said that she was a sex worker, specifically a dominatrix. (I’m assuming the gender here!) And amongst all the other things she said, she said that she no longer accepts clients who are “religious types”…these men are often full of hate towards their wives.
The big question of course is why religious types are going to a dominatrix. This is clearly an infringement of explicit Bible teaching: “Should one take the members of Christ and join them with a harlot? Certainly not! Or do you not know that one who has joined his members with a harlot is one flesh with her? But you are one spirit with Christ” – off the top of my head. So it is not a Bible teaching that has to be extrapolated, interpreted or inferred from the Bible. Rather it is sitting there explicitly in black and white: the Bible categorically says that Christian men should not pay to sleep with prostitutes/escorts/sex workers/dominatrixes (dominatrices?)/ strippers/whatever other term might exist for people who get paid for fulfilling sexual services. And yet if many otherwise sincere married Christian men do it routinely, I’m guessing that that is because they might not find sexual fulfilment in their marriages. Alternatively a percentage of men will also have problems with sexual addiction. It has just occurred to me that there might be a certain level of mental gymnastics that might allow people to justify their behaviour. “Well the Bible says that I should not join my members but it does not say anything about getting naked…I am not actually joining my members…I’m just getting whipped!” Now that this has occurred to me, I guarantee that there will be some men who say this to themselves. This is still wrong though, this is still sexual sin even if there is no actual literal “joining of members” involved. And while we are at it, if it needs to be stated, no, Christians should definitely not be making money from displaying their bodies sexually on platforms like OnlyFans, or consuming the services of people who do. And no it is also not of Christ to get around this by using something like AI to conjure up fake sexual images of non-existent people to make money from those instead OR to consume those kind of sexual AI images. If you have done this, if you have done any of this, or possibly “joined your members” then yes, there is grace for you as there has been grace for me in my own erotica struggles. But as the Apostle Paul tells us once we have received grace we do not just remain in the sin and keep requesting grace. “Shall we continue in sin so that grace may abound? Certainly not!” Rather we are to get out of our sin and leave it altogether.
On reflection, in the part of her comment that I scanned, the dominatrix did not actually specify that she was making money from this. She may just have been doing it for fun! That is equally unacceptable. If there is no money involved, then that might not technically be prostitution, but it is still adultery and immorality which God also warns us against, or “whoredom” to use the old-fashioned King James Version language. Even if no-one is married, then that is still fornication. All of these things are considered sinful and dangerous by God.

The problems with non-Christian sex
What I have written in this section here is based on the assumption that most non-Christian/non-religious couples freely have sex before marriage, even before committing to the idea of a long term relationship with one another. This means in practice that many people will have sex with a number of people or engage in hook-up culture before committing to a long term relationship with someone or getting engaged. I know that this is not always true, just like it is not true to say that all Christian couples avoid sex before marriage. I’m guessing that if you have sex freely before marriage, firstly with other people then with your future spouse, when it comes to getting married the partners will be fluent in sex, so you do not necessarily have the same issues with awkwardness as with Christian couples. And yet anecdotally, many couples still have exactly those same issues. Many women talk about how they find sex painful, awkward, or shameful, or unsatisfying, or boring, or how their partners are sexually selfish. In my reading I’ve often come across the concept of the gender orgasm gap. (I’m hoping that Mr Huggie-Wuggie and I can work together to make sure that such a gap does not arise in our marriage!) However, even if none of those same issues arise as anecdotally exist in Christian marriages, even if the spouses share a sex life that is truly wonderful, there are still a few potential pitfalls that could potentially come with non-Christian attitudes to sex:
If you’ve engaged in hook-up culture, then what you have done, whether intentionally or not, is trained yourself in the habit of discarding of sexual partners, or using people for your gratification then discarding them when you feel that you no longer need or want them, constantly looking for the next better thing. This is what hookup culture literally trains you to do. If you are marrying such a spouse, why would you be surprised when they bring that established habit into marriage with them? If you think that marriage is going to provide some magical protection, look around you, and listen to the stories filling the internet. I believe that the 4B movement where women are rejecting essentially any romantic contact with men, is the logical response to the kind of relationship irresponsibility created by the entrenched hookup culture where it is permissible and even expected for people to jump from bed to bed to bed to bed. Other women’s experiences demonstrate time after time that marriage does not break those habits.

And it is not just sexual either. If someone has trained himself or herself to use others sexually, then they might also find themselves willing and able to take advantage financially or to exploit labour. And oh look, what a surprise, there is indeed a proliferation of such stories online, of both men and women – but still mostly men – cheating on their partners, defrauding them, sometimes even plotting to end their lives to the point where some women are even stating that no man is good or can be trusted. People thought that by embracing the so-called sexual revolution they were liberating women to enjoy the same sexual freedoms that men had enjoyed for generations. But it turns out that, as other voices have said, they were simply “liberating” women to be exploited further.

This is probably why many people are now rethinking the whole sexual revolution, realising it was a bad deal for women all along. The incredulity that I am feeling as a born again Christian women, that liberal voices are now advocating for celibacy, advocating for how you can reclaim your power as a woman through celibacy. Is this not what we as Christians have been saying all along?! And the unsavoury consequences that people have been discovering are exactly what we have been saying all along! Those consequences of being with a man who has casually cycled through a variety of sexual partners are some of those I described in my ebook “The Proverb of the Milk and the Cow” over a decade ago as the potential consequences of being with a man who would pressurise you into sex. This is another demonstration of the fact that Christianity is practically true, it works, sometimes in a way that nothing else can. I remember when people would mock and deride these values of waiting. Now practical experience is driving people en masse, right back to these very same values that they previously mocked as outdated. They are using funky language to say “don’t give a man any wifely privileges until you are married!” which is saying exactly the same thing as we have always said. Now someone like me is not necessarily looked at as someone who has missed out on life, but rather someone who has been fortunate to have escaped lots of man-shaped mayhem and chaos.

Even if it is not as bad as this in your non-Christian relationship – and to be clear, it often is – then while sex might be more fluent in your marriage than say, in a Christian marriage, it does not represent anything unique about the marriage. So there might not actually be anything tangibly different about your marriage relative to your previous relationships. What I will often encounter online is that people will talk about their spouse in the same breath as their previous partners, and it will be clear that there is nothing special about this particular person or this particular relationship, this just happens to be one person in a possibly long line of people, and this just happens to be the one that they married – but the marriage could have been any single relationship out of that long list. That is, any of those previous relationships in the day to day practice of living together had exactly the same status, responsibilities and privileges as the marriage, if not in the theory of the marriage certificate. In fact there might have been some relationships that in practice more closely corresponded to marriage than the actual legal marriage. I don’t believe that this should be the case with your spouse. I believe that there should be something different about your marriage. Even if there were a number of people you could feasibly have married, then there should be a special intimacy that you work with your spouse to create in your marriage, including sexual intimacy, which should set it apart from every other relationship you have ever had, so that your spouse cannot casually be named in a list of other names.

Additionally with non-Christian relationships if you go on these fun, sexy dates, then sex might be front and centre, but you don’t necessarily build a strong foundation for your future marriage. I believe that conventional dating is a great way to overly fixate on physical attraction which might not then have the necessary foundations of excellent character which would actually make the relationship succeed. This is another way in which Christianity practically works: it is the sincere pursuit of those Christlike values of humility, honesty, love and respect for others, forgiveness, which are endlessly encouraged in the New Testament, which would make a relationship work, which makes churches work, which makes work(places) work! I was recently thinking about all those people who love to shout about how this faith is not true. And I was thinking that I would ask them, if I could. “OK, by all means tell me what standards or whose you subscribe to!” Oh, so you believe in being a good/nice person? While that is commendable, experience has taught me that I need to cut out from my life/limit interaction with even the good Christians who believe in the Bible and try to be good and nice people. The only people I can afford to make myself vulnerable to are people who are aggressively striving after Christlike character. So even if you believe in being a good person, at best that would put you at the level of those nice Christians whom I have had to cut out. And if indeed you have found a philosophy with standards that are as powerful or as effective as the Bible, please do not keep it to yourself, pray tell us all what it is!

You know, this faith is not just about being a good person. God’s standards are not just about being good, but sometimes God holds us to standards that might seem excessive that we cannot truly understand, until later, or sometimes never at all. Back when I was at uni, I did not truly understand why I needed to avoid a relationship with a non-Christian guy, especially one to whom I was very strongly attracted. All I knew was that these were God’s standards. Thankfully I obeyed God despite not understanding at all, and because of that I avoided all these difficult relationship possibilities. People who are not Christians often interpret Christian statutes about sex as judgemental moralising. However, in my experience they are more protective wisdom: God gives us these rules to protect us, not to wag His finger or condemn us.

[working to fall in love without making sure that the person truly has excellent character]

To go back to Femmie and Guy, or any other Christian relationship, it occurred to me that what they could do is as follows: (Neither Guy nor Mr Huggie-Wuggie are going to like this!) In short, they need to introduce those very aspects that they have missed out on because of “avoid avoid avoid”. Flirtation, subtle touching leading to wandering hands, fun dates, kissing, gazing into one another’s eyes. Letting yourselves be physically close to one another, allowing your bodies to naturally react to one another, letting your bodies learn to be comfortable with one another. It is about building a strong emotional connection and mutual sexual passion and confidence slowly and naturally rather than trying to force it all at once. The reason why Guy and Mr HW are not going to like it is because it will all have to happen after marriage, potentially postponing the time when the couple can actively embark on their full sexual relationship yet further. (Or perhaps I am completely wrong. Perhaps on reading this Mr Huggie-Wuggie loves this idea!) Hopefully if it is handled well then they have the opportunity to build up something genuine so that when the time comes when they both feel truly ready to go to that next step, no-one will be running away!

If you put this after the wedding, then another advantage of that is that it trains you to think that not just the sex itself, but also the getting close, the emotional/sexual build up is also reserved for marriage. So hopefully it would be easier to notice when you find yourself doing this or going down this road with someone else, OR when someone is trying to pull you into this, and quickly pull yourself out of it.

[God’s laws are to protect us, God knows how depraved human hearts can be, God is protecting us not only from other people’s worst impulses from also from our own.]