Ladies, it's up to us.

I faced an unpleasant reality this summer, one that has always lived at the back of my mind and informed a lot of my policies and decisions in regard to the opposite sex, but one which I couched in terms of extremes, and so I didn’t realize, until recently, that it extends to every aspect of my being: I am extremely vulnerable.

No one who knows me could classify me as weak; I speak my mind, I stand up for truth, I don’t mince words, and, in the paraphrased words of Robin McKinley, "I don’t suffer fools gladly. The short term of this is that I’m a bitch." I’ve undergone a lot of various stresses and challenges in the past years which have molded and shaped my character, and I’ve always striven to face my faults and weaknesses and overcome them on the quest for perfection.

But still, I’m vulnerable – easily hurt, extraordinarily sensitive to other people’s needs and opinions, desirous of meeting those needs and winning approval. Not where it comes to compromising my principles, but everywhere else.

Friends who don’t share all of my values have asked me particularly about my decision regarding chastity. "Why aren’t you going to have sex until you’re married? How can you be sure it’s going to work unless you’ve tried it? How can you know the intimacy is there? How can something that important be something you’d gamble on?"

The questions come from a place of deep concern, and not judgment, and I take them seriously. But for me (and this is the extreme in which I’ve always couched the knowledge of my own vulnerability), the gamble goes in the opposite direction: Sex is too important to gamble on before marriage. Because of my particular kind of vulnerability, I have always known that I can never, ever open myself so completely to someone unless he is fully committed to me – never, ever give of myself wholly if there’s even a possibility he could walk away the next morning. That’s the kind of gamble I cannot take, because were it to happen, the consequences would destroy me.

And of course, it’s led to a lonely dating life, even in my attempts to date Christian men, though there haven’t been very many of them. Attitudes on chastity have changed as drastically in the church over the last thirty years as in the secular culture. So I blitzed through my college years and early twenties without experiencing any challenges to my decisions, or broaches on my vulnerability, in any of the smaller ways – I didn’t receive my first kiss until I was twenty-four, and that was a meaningless throwaway, something I could (more or less, though not completely) shrug off when it didn’t work out with the guy, who wasn’t a Christian and only wanted a good time rolling in the hay – a good time which he obviously didn’t get.

But the mid-twenties have brought with them an increasing loneliness and hunger for, not a few good laughs or a few good times, but the Real Thing – love, commitment, marriage, family. A good man, a home, a couple of years cuddling on the couch and making love all over the house, breakfasts and dinners for two, and then fat kissable babies rolling around and wreaking havoc, and a sneakier sex life with hubby, giggling, whispering, and tiptoeing around the kids. All of it. Which makes any attempt at casual dating difficult, and the vulnerability even more tremulous.

Whose fault is this? No one’s. It does mean, though, that I have to set up more guards than I always thought I would need, as I realized recently. I’m not capable of casually kissing, of casually making out, of casually having a guy stay in my apartment for extended periods of time. To me, I discovered, all expressions of human sexuality are sacred: an astonishing revelation. My cultural training prepared me to take it all a lot more lightly – not sex itself, but the lead-ups to it – and I had prepared myself to be more sophisticated than I found I am. I should have suspected, perhaps, that my experience would be different from other people’s, when holding my first boyfriend’s hand sent a reaction through my body so extreme that I couldn’t breathe. But I was unprepared all the same.

Thus after this summer, I have laid some new ground rules for myself. I’m going mild – even more so than I have been in the past. I know some of my friends will be worried about these ground rules, and I know these rules will make me lonelier. Guy interests, for example, will not be welcome alone into my apartment any longer, not without the buffer of other people; and it will be a long, long, long time before I kiss one again. But I don’t know any other way to protect myself, because a month or so ago I was so heartbroken at the failure of another attempted relationship, complete with physical overtures that meant a great deal to me for their own sakes, that I fell into a grief that lasted for weeks, and from which I’m still recovering.

Sometimes I feel like a freak, because everywhere I look, in all the magazines and commercials, in conversations with friends of faith and friends outside the faith, it seems that no one is affected by these things as seriously or as deeply as I am, and vulnerability is not a merit anymore. But it’s the truth, it’s how I am, and since we no longer live in a culture where a woman’s sexual honor is cherished, and marriage encouraged, and where we live far from parents who provide a physical supervisory presence, those of us who are "freaks," who recognize our vulnerability, have to do something about it for ourselves.

My boss said a couple of things this morning, as we were talking about it a little bit. He said that my vulnerability is endearing; said, too, that men think in linear terms about sex, and that it is, as it always has been, up to women to say No. I smiled and quoted the old saying, "Men can’t cheat if women won’t." Which can be adapted to this situation: Men can’t engage in sex if women won’t. (Questions of force aside, of course, which is ever and always wrong.) Which is the truth. Even among the Christians of our age and culture, it’s the truth.

So ladies, it looks like it’s up to us. Naturally not every woman feels the way I do, but I know there are at least a handful of us who believe so strongly in the sacredness of sex and sexual pleasure that it’s worth a long wait, and whose special vulnerability makes a few extra personal rules beneficial to our overall well being. (And as I’ve said often, my virginal status at the age of almost twenty-six is certainly not for lack of a sex drive. But other things are more important than light and momentary indulgences, even in the arenas of a nice make-out session or a good-night kiss, because they're more than just that.) And I’m not talking about revolution; there are too few of us for that. But I am saying that, for those few of us who recognize our vulnerability, which, I posit, is not freakish but a stamp on every woman, though it has been stamped out of many of us by our societal upbringing, it’s worth the temporal cost of extended loneliness and strange behavioral appearances to lay down the ground rules necessary for our own protection, because we can’t count on anyone else to look out for us.

Much like Marianne said in the last post, we need to count the cost of each action we take with a man, and weigh the outcomes and the consequences. What is the gain? What is the loss? Is it worth our while? Will there be a real, substantial benefit, or only a gamble on our part with the ghost-hope of a benefit? Is fear of the loss of a might-be worth sacrificing a little more of our steadfastness, a little more of our innocence?

Oh yes, all of this is very old-fashioned. You can tell me that I’ll never get a man this way. You can tell me that I’m only reacting out of hurt and throwing up walls. Maybe it’s partially true. But my parents think the ground rules are wise. There are only two of them, after all.

I’m worth it. If a guy isn’t going to think about me and my long-term interests, as it’s apparent he won’t, even if he’s a Christian, not necessarily because he’s a monster or a self-absorbed unmentionable, but just because he’s a guy and our culture no longer, on the whole, raises gentlemen (thought I’ve met exceptions!), then I have to be the one to think about my long-term interests. And if that makes a few men frustrated, drives a few of them away, and keeps me awake and lonely on several (as L. M. Montgomery calls them) "white nights," so be it. Better lonely, but happier and whole, than a self-compromised, emptier shell. Better mild than miserable.