Early babies and other hazards of passion

Passion is a good thing, but maybe you don’t want a little friend coming along six months after the wedding.

So maybe you've navigated through all of the misadventures this blog has mentioned about the journey of the single Orthodox, and you've found someone wonderful. You and your steady sweetie are getting along very well. You have this shared faith, you love spending time together, and you’re very hopeful about this life you can share with one another. You’d think that the fact you met in church and that you belong to a strict religion ought to mean that you can behave well, but, if you’re like a lot of couples, you’re finding it even more difficult to keep your right to wear white. (Well, guys, a white shirt under your tux jacket.)

Why is this? I don’t really know, except to talk about enthusiasm. You know what kind of life you want to share with your future husband or wife, and when you see the possibility of its being fulfilled, you get really, really enthusiastic.

When I met Miri, she had this dog, Jisa (who is now our dog). When Miri came home at the end of her work day, Jisa was so happy to see her that she would start levitating. I’m not making this up. This dog can jump about five feet in the air.

If that’s how you feel about your steady sweetie, that’s a very good thing. Now go take a cold shower so you don’t have to shop for a maternity-size wedding gown.

I suppose at this point in my wandering advice, someone might point out that there is such a thing as birth control. Indeed, there is, and here are several methods that Orthodox unmarried people can use:

• Say evening prayers at the beginning of your “quality time” after dinner.
• Read "On Chastity" from The Ladder of Divine Ascent by St. John Climacus. (Avoid the life of St. Mary of Egypt)
• Donate money you would have spent on slinky lingerie to Mary & Martha House.
• Read about the Sympto-Thermal Method of family planning. (Really, guys, the fluids you have to learn about are pretty gross.)
• Take walk with aforementioned energetic dog. Stay out until dog is tired.
• Sing your sweetie’s favorite Orthodox hymn, off key (this one still works even now that I’m married)
• Read some Psalms together, but avoid the Song of Solomon at all costs.

And then, there’s the one that really does work…

• Go to Confession.

All kidding aside, you really do need to take this one seriously. A pair of good secular parents would probably want their children to wait until marriage to have sex just because they don’t want their grandchildren born into a potentially unstable home. Or, they might counsel you against it because sex will confuse the getting-to-know-you process of a quality engagement. (Am I really in love, or is the sex just that good?) Both of these are good reasons to wait, but for us Orthodox, there’s more to it than just the obvious practical benefits.

One of our highest duties as human beings is to pass down a better human nature to our children than the one we got. In Genesis, it says that Adam bore the image and likeness of God, but Seth bore the image and likeness of Adam, meaning that Seth still contained the image and likeness of God, but it was distorted by Adam’s sin. In Exodus, God tells Moses:

“The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” (Exodus 34:6-7)

Fr. Thomas Hopko talks a lot about this in his taped lectures God & Gender, especially as it relates to sex. He makes it clear that God is not saying “I am going to squash you because your great-grandfather sinned,” rather, this means that if you commit a serious sin, for example, fooling around sexually, your children and grandchildren are going to suffer from very strong temptations to do the same kind of fooling around. If you wound your human nature with sin, you’re going to pass on a wounded human nature to your descendants. If your descendants fight against the sin, it is possible to clean this sin up, but it will take four generations to do it. In short, you don't want original sin to be the cause of your original kin.

This is why the Old Testament is so long. Every time Israel fell away, God would bring His people back to be purified, but it would take generations for the sins of the fathers to be cleaned up. Eventually, this process of repentance successfully culminated in the birth of the Virgin Mary, which made the New Testament possible.

What this means to you, now, young person whose ears get hot when you’re with your sweetie: Keep your human nature safe so that your children won’t have to pay for your fooling around. If you don’t, here’s my guess of what will happen:

You will have several very gorgeous daughters, all with excellent social skills and fashion sense. Boys will flock around them, and their ability to say “no” isn’t going to be very strong. Parenthood for you is going to be following your daughters around with a loaded shotgun, and even so, you’ll end up raising your children and grandchildren simultaneously.

I am predicting that this will happen even if you use condoms now and don’t conceive until after you’re married. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

One other benefit of waiting: Having been married for ten months, I can say that the whole process of having someone new living in your house and giving up control about “how things are done” is difficult. And, my stepdog, Jisa, licks me on the face when I won’t get up to play in the morning, and during the day, she has a habit of coming up to me several hundred times a day with a slobber-covered toy and asking me to throw it for her. It’s really tempting to yell at my wife’s beloved dog, but it’s a lot easier to get over the small annoyances such as these when you’re crazy-in-love with your wife. I know that this passion is not going to last forever. But, my hope is that by the time the initial fervor of being married wears off, we’ll have a “working system” of being in the house together, and marriage will still be fun, occasionally passionate. I really think that couples who start having sex before they’re married cheat themselves out of this “honeymoon year” in which they figure out the little things such as which way the toilet roll goes on the spool.

And, besides, guys, wouldn't you like to have a few months of your life when bringing home a box of chocolates gets you whatever you want? Treasure it while you've got it.