This is an important topic for Christians because sexual development at least in First World countries follows a path that assumes most children will not marry until they have completed their secondary education. For Christians, that mandates celibacy and virginity throughout the adolescent years, and the norms are also that most Christians marrying for the first time in their younger years are virgins and therefore have no prior sexual experience. It can also be the case that there are unresolved traumas from childhood or other factors that may have impeded healthy sexual development during childhood or adolescence. Christians who marry at younger ages, for example early 20s, have less sexual and life maturity than those marrying in their early 30s and therefore less opportunity to resolve factors that impede healthy sexual development. Women especially are under pressure to marry at younger ages because of the limitations posed by their biological fertility clock, whereas their husbands are often older. Generally speaking, unresolved sexual development issues tend to become more prominent as a relationship becomes more intimate and those who are committed to a relationship developing towards a marriage need to allow enough time for any issues to be resolved before marrying, and once a marriage has commenced, allowing enough space in the marriage to resolve new or ongoing issues. The topics on the rest of this website have provided a lot of coverage for singles but so far not a lot has really covered the period between the point at which a Christian couple become engaged and when they commence their marriage, as well as the early stages of sexual development in the marriage. Hence, this article attempts to address the preparation and development phase that takes place when an engagement is confirmed. This article is the first of a series as it is useful to construct an introduction to set the ball rolling on the topic and then expand further on the theme in subsequent posts.
During periods of singleness when any Christian is not committed to a marital relationship, they are free to develop their sexuality, as described elsewhere on this website, through a process of discovering things about their physical sexual and spiritual bodies, by educating themselves in the knowledge of what healthy Christian sexuality is about, from the perspective both of what is healthy to know and understand about their own gender and what is healthy to know and understand about the opposite gender. This process of sexual development innately gives them a degree of freedom in discovery that is not present in a marriage. Bluntly speaking, the learning often takes place by becoming aware of the sexual characteristics of a wide range of other people, which can include the viewing of visual media of these people, including photographs depicting various degrees of nudity and various types of sexual activity. Sex education is a controversial topic, yet a necessary one to address in a societal and familial context, and on this website a great deal of the content is largely focused on healthy self-directed sex education for Christians, where healthy means in physical, sexual and spiritual contexts, the last of these being especially important for committed believers. As is made clear elsewhere in this site, the key issue for Christians to address is not in viewing or accessing visual media, but in avoiding negative PSS consequences that may develop if proper practices are not followed. Such consequences can also arise as a result of sexual abuse, assault or other trauma, and the associated ministry with this site aims to address and resolve all consequences howsoever they may occur.
Our core belief is that for Christians, sexual development is a private activity. Whilst we express our sexuality in public in a healthy way in day to day life, we expect Christians to follow high standards of behaviour in public life whether single or married, not just because we expect Christians to set these high standards as a witness of their faith, but also because we expect that Christians will not follow a double standard of accepting and tolerating commonly found sexual immorality in society at large whilst at the same time preaching a higher standard in their family life and in their churches. Such a double standard is essentially a form of unequal yoking and can lead to the negative consequences predicted in the Bible. For single Christians in periods of sexual development, that is, from the age of adolescence onwards, we believe that they can be encouraged and supported in healthy self-directed sex education provided that they make and maintain a clear separation in the degree of sexual expression between their private and public lives. This is not a double standard, it is simply a recognition that greater levels of sexual expression are possible in private because this is fundamentally more healthy at all three PSS bases. Hence, a Christian is expected to keep their self directed sex education essentially private and in so doing has a greater degree of freedom to discover and develop their sexuality in private, and must in so doing commit to restraining that freedom in public. There is considerable pressure upon young men and women in public settings simply by spending their days in close proximity to other people, for example in school classrooms, and the healthy way to deal with such pressures is to restrain them in the public setting until they can be addressed more freely in a private setting. This public restraint includes the making of wise choices about avoiding situations that are likely to intensify those public pressures, and a balance is also needed in providing sufficient opportunities for younger Christians to have those private times where they can masturbate to relieve sexual tensions that have built up during the day and to sexually express themselves more freely.
The key issue for marriage relationships that the preceding paragraphs are leading towards is that the freedom of sexual development and expression that single Christians have is much more limited in a marriage, and the engagement period is the point at which the prospective husband and wife need to adjust to the reality that their freedom is now to be exercised exclusively between each other. The self-directed sex education as it is referred to above changes at this point to take place in a joint context where both partners are in full agreement about its nature and content. Generally in a marital context further sex education will be directed equally by the husband and wife mutually together and visual content components will be largely derived from each other’s nude bodies. Any other content generally may only be obtained from specialised Christian relationship ministries that uphold the same principles as generally articulated on this website and with full pastoral oversight and input from the couple’s home church as well as that which exists in and over the specific ministries. Any type of situation or process that results in either partner independently seeking their own content outside the marriage or outside pastoral oversight in their church is akin to adultery in all PSS contexts and therefore is likely to lead to many negative consequences for the marriage.
Well that is our introductory article and the second article due possibly later today will go into a bit more detail expanding on the above content. It is likely at this stage that will be followed by articles that address specific male and female contexts for pre-marital/early-marital sexual development.