Ruth Institute Blog

Let’s say that you’ve been reading the Ruth Blog for a while.  You’ve seen my brilliant and insightful commentary about how stupid it is to hook up.  You decide that you will refrain from having sex until you are married.

That decision is not just a resolution.  It’s also a prediction.  How accurate is that prediction?

Well, you see, you probably made that prediction when you were in a “cold” state.  Chances are that no matter how witty and penetrating my commentary may be, I doubt that it produces strong feelings of sexual excitement in many readers.  Then again, you never know.  You have to admit, these posts are pretty darn good.

Anyway, you made G-d and yourself a promise not to have sex until marriage while you were not aroused.  Chances are that you were overly optimistic in your prediction that you would be able to keep that promise to yourself precisely because you made it in a “cold” state.  If you ever ended up in a state in which you were “hot.”  The world tends to look a lot different during sexual excitement with a willing partner.

Here’s an explanation as to why from a fascinating 1997 article entitled “Wouldn’t it be Nice:  Predicting Future Feelings.“  (Emphasis added).

Any reader of fiction will find non-controversial the notion that people often underpredict the power of their own sexual desires. Indeed virtually every one of the French
novelist Georges Simenon’s non-detective novels examines diverse consequences of such intrapersonal underprediction. People go on dates planning to refrain from having sex, engage in foreplay with the expectation of using a condom at the next stage, and initiate sex with the plan to “interrupt” prior to the critical moment. As Gold (1993) found in interviews with gay men about their attempts to practice safe sex, however, such resolutions often break down in the “heat of the moment.” Daum (1996) exposes the foolishness of admonitions to practice safe sex in a New York Times Magazine article titled “Safe-Sex Lies.”

Loewenstein, Nagin & Paternoster (1996) hypothesized that male youths would estimate a higher likelihood of committing date rape when they were sexually aroused than when they were
not aroused. They randomly assigned undergraduate males to view sexually arousing or nonarousing photographs and exposed them to a vivid first-person scenario in which “their date” asked them to stop. Aroused subjects reported substantially higher likelihoods of behaving in a sexually aggressive fashion than nonaroused subjects, a finding that is consistent with the prediction that nonaroused subjects would have a difficult time imagining what they might do if
they were aroused.

In other words, sexually aroused people are not famous for making good decisions about sex.  You might not think so, but you too could become a person with poor judgment if you allow yourself to become sexually aroused with the wrong person or at the wrong time.  So, if you’re serious about saving yourself for marriage, don’t get into any, um, heated moments, so to speak, until you’re married.