Sex isn't everything...or is it?

At 35, Nicole Hardy, author of Confessions of a Latter-day Virgin, felt her virginity was holding her back. Many, including her mom, told her the common phrase, “sex isn’t everything.” And that is a pretty easy thing to say when you are married, or when you have had sex, and lots of it, in your life. But not for us. Just maybe, for us, sex is everything.

If you are reading this, you probably don’t worry too much about where your next meal is going to come from, or spend the whole day thinking about food. But try not eating for three weeks and then going a day, a single day, without thinking about food.

Try to walk down the street where you know every person you see has eaten recently, or will soon eat. Walk by restaurants where people are enjoying meals. Walk by homes and apartments where you will see silhouettes of people at tables with forks and knifes. Homes and apartments that are filled with people who you know eat multiple times per week. Walk by cars where people sit enjoying some chips or other small appetizers. Go to a movie where people laugh and talk about eating, and eat before you on screen. Walk into a room where someone has fully set out thanksgiving dinner on the table, where the turkey is under a metallic cover, where you know it will remain until after you leave, because you aren’t having any, because you are not eating.

Do that and then come tell me “sex isn’t everything,” and it is only small part of the whole relationship, that you can enjoy the more important and deep parts of a romantic relationship now with other relationships in your life, bla, bla, bla.

Do that first and then, with your mouth watering for the spaghetti sauce I am cleaning from my lips,  I will tell “food isn’t everything” and you will understand to some extent how we feel when you tell us “sex isn’t everything” after having kissed your wife 10 minutes earlier.

I know that sex isn’t everything. I know that a relationship is more than sex. But because of my involvement with the Mormon Church, I have gone 26 years without ever doing it. Though maybe not quite as life-threatening as not eating for that long, it is still a biological need that has been ignored, and so has become, unfortunately, everything. Everything I don’t have.

I was amazed when I was on my mission at age 20 to hear a lady talk about her dating life as an older female in the United States. She said how she actually preferred talking to non-Members in her online dating, because she said how Mormon guys always went straight to talking about sex or marriage very quickly. I didn’t understand that then, but I do now.

Frankly, most Mormon men are messed up. There is a reason Utah has the highest rate of porn subscriptions in the United Sates. Most Mormon single-adult men and women are, like me, adolescents in adult bodies. They have never plunged through that early voyeurism and been able to put it behind and focus on the deeper and more important that matter in relationships and life. They are left with a longing, a painfully sad regret and longing.

And such is the life of many of us 20 or 30 something Mormon virgins.