LAURA: Welcome to Sex.Really. I’m Laura Sessions Stepp.
When you hear the word abstinence, what image comes to mind? A woman sitting primly, legs crossed? A man with a dour face who rails against sin, leaving you feeling just a little bit guilty?
Well, our three young guests today all chose to be sexually abstinent. They know abstinence believers who are humorless and judgmental. But as you’ll hear, they are neither.
We’re going to start with Echo Olsen. Echo is a dental assistant, who could be the poster child for the increasingly popular phrase, “hot chastity.”
Echo lives in Los Angeles. But she grew up near Reno, Nevada in a little town called – and I’m not making this up – Sparks.
ECHO: I grew up in a traditional nuclear family. I had really good parents, who were really good and open with me. And also, we are a Mormon family, so I was raised with pretty conservative religious values in the home as well.
LAURA: I first met Echo when she sent me an email describing what she called the NCMO - the Mormon version of hooking up.
ECHO: The NCMO, the non-committal make-out. It’s just making out with somebody that you have no intention of dating. And I was the queen of it. And sometimes the lines would get blurred as to what’s okay and what’s not okay.
LAURA: When that line got blurry, Echo turned to her parents.
ECHO: My parents were wonderful with me. If I was making out with a boy and I thought, oh no, did I go too far, I had no problem asking my mother: Was that too much? Was that too much to do with that person? She would just sit down and talk to me very frankly. And my mom was great— she always said that all the women in her family were hot-blooded. Sex was just always a topic that okay in my house.
My father, he’s a lot more conservative than my mom, but even my father made it very clear when I was very young, that sex is a wonderful thing and we should have lots of it when we’re married.
LAURA: 14 years ago, Echo first saw the man who would become her husband. She was nine at the time.
ECHO: He was so magnetic, and I never forgot him, ever. And then I was 23 years old, and I was in a musical, and he came. And I saw him in the audience, and he took my breath away. I was like— that’s that guy, the guy I saw when I was nine, and he’s still handsome, and he’s still amazing. And so we ended up striking up a conversation, and we had a lot of similar interests. And you know, I don’t mean to make light of something I feel is sacred, but I kind of feel like it’s the closest thing to having God sit down next to me and tell me that’s your husband right there.
LAURA: On one particular night early in their courtship, he did something that clinched the deal.
ECHO: It was so romantic, it was right at dusk. I was leaving and I had this crappy little car, and I couldn’t get the door open. And I was jiggling the door handle, and I couldn’t get it. And all of a sudden I felt his big hands right around my waist, and he started to kiss me really lightly on the back of my neck, and then he just turned me around and planted the most beautiful, passionate kiss on me I’ve ever had in my entire life. It was amazing.
I’ve had lots of guys touch me like they want to throw me on the floor, but this was just chills up and down my spine.
LAURA: Her husband was Catholic, 15 years older, and not a virgin. His beliefs differed from Echo, but he respected her choices.
ECHO: There were plenty of times where when we would be kissing and things would get passionate, that I would not necessarily know where the line was, and he would be the first one to say this is where we have to stop things, because I don’t want to deal with the repercussions of how you’ll feel if we go farther.
LAURA: Her family took to him right away.
ECHO: My dad loves my husband like he’s his own son, and my mom does too. You know we do believe that our doctrine is true, and it’s important. But good people are good people.
LAURA: Young people like Echo belong to a small demographic group. Most single people in their 20s have had sex at least once. Among 20- to-24-year-olds, 80 percent say they’ve had sex within the last year. Almost 70 percent within the last three months.
Sometimes people assume that all abstinence is motivated by religion. But that’s not always the case, as we hear now from Ari, a radio producer in Massachusetts.
ARI: I don’t really know why I decided to do it. I don’t know if I ever made an active decision, but I just never decided not to. It was almost like that was the default setting.
It wasn’t like I believe you’ll only have sex when you’re married. But there was something about that, that it was like, finding a partner that was a really good match. So, I don’t know. I think it may have just taken me longer.
LAURA: For Ari, abstinence wasn’t about religion or his family.
ARI: My religious faith had nothing to do with it. I’m Jewish, but I was raised fairly secular. And so it didn’t really factor in for me.
I hadn’t really thought about where that came from. I mean, I feel like my parents, we’re very open as a family and we talk about lots of things, and we talk about relationships too, and about our feelings rather openly. But one thing that we don’t really talk about, or haven’t talked about, very much is sex. So it wasn’t anything that they ever told me—that you should abstain. But sex wasn’t really a aprt of our lives.
LAURA: Ari dated a couple of women who came on to him, and they were puzzled when he didn’t jump at the chance to have sex.
ARI: I remember that with one of those women in particular, it was hard for her to understand how I wouldn’t have seized the opportunity to have sex. I don’t think she really understood why I said no.
LAURA: Ari wasn’t necessarily waiting for marriage. And at some point, he began to reconsider his feelings.
ARI: By not doing it, it kind of grew in proportion. It grew in significance beyond what it should have. I continue to think that it’s sacred, but it almost became so sacred that I would never be ready in some ways; I would never get to the point, because it was just so special.
And then in the current relationship that I’m in, it was something that neither of us had ever done before. We were both in the same boat, we were both nervous about it. And it was something that we arrived at after getting to know each other, and expressing ourselves in different ways. We talked to each other a lot about our commitment to each other and what that meant. I think that, for both of us was really important.
LAURA: Ari sees abstinence as a choice, and one he can return to, even after having been sexually active.
ARI: We tried it a bunch of times, and it was really beautiful, it was really nice. And incredibly special. Recently we’ve stopped again, and I feel really great about that whole sequence. I think for me it was the right kind of timing for it.
LAURA: Our final guest is Nuriya, a resident in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco. Nuriya has no intention of changing her mind about abstinence.
NURIYA: I define abstinence as no sexual activity at all, whatsoever.
LAURA: Like Echo, Nuriya was close with her parents. But they never talked about sex.
NURIYA: I don’t remember seeing and videos, I don’t remember looking at any books, I don’t remember having discussions at all with my parents about avoiding pre-marital sex.
LAURA: Nuriya and her twin sister made a pact with each other to be abstinent until they got married.
NURIYA: On my thirteenth birthday, my parents gave my sister and me a necklace and a ring; one signifying that we would abstain from sexual intercourse until marriage, and the other one signifying that we would choose a drug and alcohol free life. And that’s a pact that we made silently with our parents and silently with each other that we would maintain until we got married. And I’ve taken it on as a challenge and now have made it a personal mission.
LAURA: Has it been difficult to stay faithful to that?
NURIYA: It has not been difficult at all, interestingly enough. I think when you have a friend or a partner or someone who you are accountable to—in my case it’s my sister, because we made the pact together.
LAURA: Nuriya says if a man expresses interest in dating, she tells him up front that she’s abstinent.
LAURA: Does this mean that you don’t date much?
NURIYA:I have had no problem dating; you’d be surprised. I think there are more young men in the world then people think who actually respect women who respect themselves.
LAURA: But take sex out of a relationship, and what do you have? If it’s a good relationship, a lot, Nuriya says.
NURIYA: I’ve had a couple of long-term relationships, and we’ve had wonderful times together going on dates, going to the movies, going out to eat, and going bowling.
I think you can definitely still have a passionate relationship without intercourse. I think passion for many people means something in between the sheets. But I think passion for others of us means the relationship and the connection that you have with another person that is mental and physical and spiritual. And I also think the nice thing about not having a sexual relationship with a partner, that you can stay very rational about your relationship. Sometimes feelings become so overwhelming in sexual relationships that you really cannot see clearly what’s going on in the relationship. I really don’t have that problem.
LAURA: Nuriya knows that many kids will be making their own sexual choices without the kind of example she had at home. So as a physician and as a friend, she says she doesn’t push her beliefs on others. Trusting in God to help you make the right choices is a fine idea, but sometimes, God needs a little assistance.
NURIYA: Because I work in the field of obstetrics and gynecology, I am privy to reality. And if women choose not to be abstinent, then my goal as a health care provider is to encourage the safest possible intercourse.
LAURA: Nuriya says her position extends even to public school education.
NURIYA: I am whole-heartedly a proponent of comprehensive sex education. We know that approximately half of all unintended pregnancies are from a lack of contraceptive use at the time of conception. Since we have those statistics, I think our goal should be to promote contraception use. I think abstinence should definitely be mentioned as a form of contraception, however I think that we really need to get real with what’s going on in our society and what’s going on with our young people, and really address the issues that are prevalent.
LAURA: I couldn’t say it any better.
I’m Laura Sessions Stepp, and this is Sex.Really. We’ll be back in two weeks with brand-new, mind-blowing research on what 20-somethings know—and don’t know—about sex. And what they actually think about having babies.
What Do You Think?