Long Term Success in MarriageIf you've been married 10+ years and consider your marriage a success, post your success story here. Help others by talking about what works for you.
View Poll Results: Is Virginity a guaranty for a successful marriage?
No. Doesn't mean anything. There are other values that are more important
Just some comments to share. Trying to offer both opinions on the topic and offer constructive suggestions for the academic part.
First, you should tighten up your methods of gathering info and framing the problem you are trying to solve. For example, the poll asks if virginity is a guarantee and the response choice talks about 'importance' of virginity. Also, I'd be interested in how you are classifying 'cultures'. You come from eastern europe but live in the US. You are affected by your upbringing and the culture within which you now live. Indians and Chinese in the US or Europe, for example, also are not a product of a single, defined culture. You are also bringing education and other things into it. To determine the correlation of marital success with other factors, you need to do a study a proper study or take another approach to your research (e.g. explore a few case studies via interviews, etc). You need to be clear in your definition of 'marital success' (and that should not be divorce - many culture where virginity is treasured also strongly discourage divorce). There are a million things that cause marriages to fail so you need to somehow deal with the other variables in your research methods and not assume virginity is the only causal factor of failure or success.
Anyway, I would think (but i'm hardly an expert) compatibility of attitudes and morals (which don't necessarily reflect past behavior) are more indicative of marital success.
I'm certainly not a proponent of abstinence before marriage but I disagree with those who equate having sex with determining sexual compatibility. Couple 'A' can have a very open sexual relationship and do a lot of sexual things without having intercourse. They can discuss sex openly as well as experiment together. Couple B has had intercourse but are very closed about it and have not explored their sexuality nearly as much as couple A. Equating having intercourse with knowing someone sexually is wrong and simply having intercourse with someone before marriage is not a good way to determine your sexual compatibility.
My wife and I got married sooner than planned due to an unplanned pregnancy. Neither of us were virgins when we met, and we started having sex within the first 2 months of the relationship. We are happy now and for the most part compatible, aside from a couple hangups that I expect to be worked out in due time, however I will always wonder in the back of my mind how things might have been different if we had waited. I was really eager to jump into bed with her from the get-go, being a horny bastard in my late 20s! Not a virgin, but with very limited experience. Would I have lost interest? Would she? Would we still be together now?
The idea of waiting until you are married until you have sex is appealing; however the thought of being sexually frustrated due to unforseen problems is not so much! It seems like a huge grey area to me, even though I was raised to believe sex is for marriage only.
As part of our pre-marital counseling with the pastor we agreed to abstain from sex for about 3-4 months before the wedding after having moved in sooner than I would have liked to due to the pregnancy, this was excruciating for me!.we 'cheated' maybe once or twice, but it did make the honeymoon much more exciting for both of us!
If sex is the foundation of relationship and you must "try" them out, what happens after kids when sex is less frequent?? Just read this board. There is a reason that history has placed value on chastity and all the reasoning and justifying in the world can't change that.
If you are doing a study or research, have you viewed the Teachman research?
I would much prefer to find out a woman had low libido BEFORE marrying her. It's much easier to send a girlfriend down the road than to buy an ex-wife a house and put a lawyer's kids through college.
I would love to break down the stats for what people think who actually married virgins, it only seems to be people who DIDN'T or WERE NOT virgins busting on being marrying virigins. I also don't think there is much diffence between being a V on the wedding night vs 1 partner.
I think people who were not V's or didn't marry V's see this as an attack on their "value" as a spouse. I think that they can be every bit as good a spouse!
I would concede that a 30 year old V would be very unusual. I don't buy the sexual incomaptibilty one bit AS IS COMPARES TO SEXUAL HISTORY. This board is filled with people who are sexually frustrated with the lack of sex in the relationship. Things are always grand at first.
I don't care about all of the chastity or moral content......that's a topic for a different day....and I've been on both sides of that street.
Looking back at my sexual partners there was one girl and that is the reason we broke up!! I was bigger 6'2" 230 she was small 5'0 adn 105lbs and for me she was just too small for my liking....sweet girl, but not in the cards.
To ramble on more there was another girlfriend who was just really really noisy borderline "adult film" and I hated it.....very rough in a sloppy convulsive way....didn't like sex with her either.
For that reason alone I think it's important in a safe, protected, enviroment. If your beliefs don't allow it well then don't.
Sex with my wife has always been good she a catch and everything I want.
I'm male and remained a virgin until I meet my wife. I knew the second she came into my life that I was going to marry her, so even though I had waited until I was 28 (no previous intercourse, but I had given and received oral) I didn't even think about not having sex with her when the it came up. Yet with other women I never made that "leap". It was the right time with the right person. I will admit to having just stopped telling people or mentioning my virginity after a while. People treated me like a freak and that's not how it was. Catholic upbringing with two parents who showed me what not to do had a lot to do with it. As a matter of fact I didn't tell my wife I had been a virgin at the time until almost a year later.
Society just seems to look at Male and female virgins differently. Female who keep their virginity until marriage are often applauded and males are looked at as some kind of weird freak.
I'm male and remained a virgin until I meet my wife. I knew the second she came into my life that I was going to marry her, so even though I had waited until I was 28 (no previous intercourse, but I had given and received oral) I didn't even think about not having sex with her when the it came up. Yet with other women I never made that "leap". It was the right time with the right person. I will admit to having just stopped telling people or mentioning my virginity after a while. People treated me like a freak and that's not how it was. Catholic upbringing with two parents who showed me what not to do had a lot to do with it. As a matter of fact I didn't tell my wife I had been a virgin at the time until almost a year later.
Society just seems to look at Male and female virgins differently. Female who keep their virginity until marriage are often applauded and males are looked at as some kind of weird freak.
I don't feel this way about virgins at all- my husband waited for me till he was 25 yrs old, I was 22. We did touch ourselves to orgasm but never had intercoarse or oral sex. I was so tight when we married he could not get it in. Took months!
I have 2 christians sons who want to remain pure till their wedding day. So far so good. One is 20, the other 14.
All I worry about with them is marrying a girl who never masterbated and after the wedding finding out she does not like sex. This happens more than one may think. I have read enough stories about it. My oldest seems to think just cause a couple waits -God will automatically BLESS them with HOT desire & they will ride into sexual bliss. I think he needs more assurance than a belief on this one!
So for all of the waiting virgins out there, make sure your fiance has a feirce drive, the harder to handle , the better sign it is, be careful not to repress it too much or it could go the other way (plenty of those stories as well).
A good sign is a masterbating virgin! If she has NO desire for this, and it is EASY to refrain, she doesn't think about it, I say RUN RUN RUN -if you are a man who is high drive ! You are taking an awful gamble with your futrue happiness in the marital bedroom.
Me & my husband were lucky. We both masterbated & we was compelled to touch each other-it would have been almost impossible for us not too, so he KNEW I had "drive" even though I still felt guilty about it & a range of shameful things swirled in my head, I have always loved sex.
I would like to submit that modern "civilization", with all its education, is not as enlightened as it thinks itself, and many societal analysts, like Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, see us at the edge of a precipice, with unprecedented numbers of people, young and old, suffering depression, committing suicide, and perpetrating more violent crimes (i.e.-Columbine, VA Tech), all from feelings of emptiness and failure.
I would also like to submit that those who do not value chastity (notice I said chastity, the respect for your future spouse, not the presence of a hymen, since those can be easily lost in other non-sexual ways) before marriage do not understand it's deeper purpose, and will in fact never know the depth of union that is possible between a married man and woman, and the resulting joy, fulfillment, and security, which will be passed to their children. But many of us, unfortunately, don't think that far ahead.
And there are consequences to non-chastity, mostly affecting the psyche of both individuals, and in turn, of their children, who end up involved in more self-destructive behavior than their parents. Just look at teen statistics today vs. 20,30,50 years ago.
In conclusion, if chastity has not been maintained, especially by the mother, (who is the ultimate nurturing presence for her children, and who usually invests a lot more emotional energy into a sexual relationship), there must be "repentance" (i.e.- acknowledging past promiscuous behaviors as wrong, and having a renewed and intense commitment to her family, shunning the past- and it will be like running a marathon pulling a tire behind you- but the prize is raising well-minded, healthy children to grow into the kind of leaders our "civilized" society so desperately needs. There are always outliers/exceptions, but as a general rule, chastity is of great value to the family environment, which are the "cells" of any nation.
"All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still." -Anton Checkhov
P.S. - the poll on this page asking if virginity is important is extremely flawed and biased because 1)it does not reveal the sex of the person voting, 2)whether or not they are virgins 3)choices are biased towards "no" (it should be: YES, NO, MAYBE, not YES, NO *suggestive clause*, and MAYBE)
It depends on the age of the person and the amount of training giving to him or her by the parent.
Secondly fear of God in that person's life. Virginity can only make him or her to believe that his or her spouse is the best for sex since that is the very first person. What about the other characters that makes a woman?
Sex with complete straingers is one thing, but sex in a serious commited relationship I say is a must. You really need physical and emotional stimulation to grow as a couple.
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Re: Pre-marital sex or no? 
I know MANY long married (20-50 years) couples who shacked up and had sex before marriage.
Re: Pre-marital sex or no? 
