But maybe the water under the bridge feels good…

Some days it seems like every single thing I do ends up being about romantic relationships (or, even worse, sex). I’m having a day of the latter variety. From classes to facebook to the blogs and comics I read, it seems that everything is about sex today. The mindset that everyone (married or no) is doing it makes me feel very impatient.

Because I’m not, and I wish I were. It’s at these points that Christian morality becomes very difficult. I know that if I were to hit up onlinebootycall.com (I’m not kidding, this is real), I would feel bad afterwards. I also know that my future wife would be very upset that onlinebootycall.com was a significant part of my pre-marriage existence. But at the moment, it doesn’t make much sense to deprive myself. It feels masochistic, really. Disciplined is a more Christian-ese word for it, but regardless of what it’s called, it’s frustrating.

And I know why we are called to married monogamy. God didn’t create sex for random hookups, nor did he invent it to combat loneliness. He created it as a way for the married couple to be in union physically, just as they are (should be) emotionally, mentally, and all other ways. Awesome. Great. Totally on board with that. Unfortunately, I’m 0% married.

Married people tell me all the time to stay single as long as I can, because those are the best days ever. I challenge that these people must have forgotten what being single was actually like. Idealization of the best parts of something is easy to do, especially retrospectively.

I never want to get into a relationship just for the physical aspect of it. That’s a bad plan. But still, the absence of the physical aspect in my life is more marked than the absence of the emotional aspect. I get emotional intimacy from my friends and family. I don’t get physical intimacy from my friends, because as my friend Sarah Mitchell is so quick to point out, make-out buddies are like communism: perfect on paper, but a total failure in practice.

So, I remain. God is good, and I know that his design for this whole scheme is better than my own. I just really, really want to get there. srsly.

Josh Ritter – To the Dogs or Whoever