Kathryn Jean Lopez introduces a great interview with these words:
Dawn Eden, an editor at the New York Daily News and blogger with an eclectic background, is author of a new book published by Thomas Nelson called The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On. Eden’s tried it both ways, and in the book describes the life-changing experience that came with her decision to stop having lots of sex in the city.
Some excerpts:
Lopez: What was it that made you go chaste?
Eden: I had an intense faith experience when I was 31 that transformed me from an agnostic Reform Jew to a believing Christian. Until that point, I had bought completely into the culture’s message that the way to make a man fall in love with you is to have sex with him.
I knew that my unchaste lifestyle was incompatible with my faith. More than that, in the light of faith, I realized something I’d tried to deny to myself for years — that all the sex I’d ever experienced hadn’t brought me any closer to marriage. In fact, engaging in premarital sex had actually prevented me from gaining the emotional maturity necessary to sustain a marriage.
Lopez: What is your practical definition of chastity?
Eden: Chastity is a state of mind. It’s placing sex within its proper context of married love. What it isn’t is objectification — viewing another human being as a means to sexual gratification.
Lopez: Who is this book for?
Eden: The Thrill of the Chaste is for women in their 20s and older who have gained the awareness that premarital sex is not making them happy. It’s especially intended to help them get off the serial-dating merry-go-round — which I describe as more like a drug habit than a romantic paradigm — and show them that they will be happier being chaste than having sex with men who are unwilling to marry them.Lopez: Libertarians and the left often accuse conservatives of being anti-sex. While there is a difference between chastity and celibacy, do you in fact not want unmarried adults to have sex? Isn’t that a tad unrealistic?
Eden: It’s not unrealistic, it’s countercultural — that’s why it’s exciting! Remember, the people who are going to pick up "The Thrill of the Chaste" are women who find that premarital sex is not making them happy. If they’re able to admit to themselves that they’re not attaining what they want to attain, then they’re likely to be willing to take a risk in pursuit of their greater goal.
Lopez: What’s your realistic message to young people?
Eden: I don’t recommend my book to teenagers — it’s too mature for them. Besides, there are countless books for them on abstinence, while there is only one for women in their 20s and 30s — mine. But if I had to give them a message, I would tell teenage girls that holding onto their virginity is really holding on to their hope, their optimism, and their wonder. Having premarital sex makes you cynical really quick — and then you find that the kind of man who would make a great husband isn’t attracted to a woman whose sexual experiences have given her a hard shell.
Lopez: You write, “If you come away from this book with only one message, let it be this: ‘Through chastity — and only through chastity — can all the graces that are part of being a woman come to full flower in you’” What do you mean by this?
Eden: I was thinking of Mary when I wrote that — Our Lady of Grace, as she appears on the Miraculous Medal. She is able to shed her spiritual gifts upon us — gifts of love, peace, charity, wisdom, patience — because she sees us as we are and loves us as we are. Chastity takes the veil off your eyes so that you begin to delight in others not for what they can do for you, but simply because they are delightful. (more)