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How we waited for marriage
Casey and Karen
After 10 years of marriage, and three kids, my wife and I were looking back the other day at our dating experience. I'm a year and a half older than Karen, and we dated from my senior year in high school until when she graduated from college, about six years. In that time, we gained such a friendship, and familiarity with each other that it helped us immensely as our marriage started. We're still very best friends, which is such a sweet benefit!
I don't necessarily recommend long dating relationships for everyone, but it helped us to get on our feet. It did create a few challenges for us in our physical relationship, but we both wanted to save ourselves for marriage – and did so! As I reflect on how we handled things, I thought that our experience might help others. It wasn't particularly easy – Karen is such a fox, and still is, in fact… but again there were a few things that we did which really helped us to succeed.
First off, we both communicated – and were truly in love. We both knew that we wanted to wait, and honored that…we agreed to be a check and balance for each other. I honored her wish because I loved her… and knew that if I went beyond our limit we would both seriously regret it. It went beyond the way I felt about it… because of my love for her I couldn't imagine doing something that would make her feel that way.
I mentioned a limit that we set; I think that a real key for us was that we drew a “line” physically that we agreed to and didn't want to cross. That line moved slightly from time to time, but was set far enough away from making a “mistake” that if we crossed it, it wasn't a complete failure. If one of us felt that we went too far, we would pull back, and “reset” That was key. On our wedding night, I can say that I saw Karen naked for the very first time, which with a six year dating relationship was a real accomplishment!
Here was our “line” – knowing that we had a long term relationship, we wanted to have a way to share our love for each other physically without going too far. We obviously kissed, and had long kissing sessions, with some petting… but we remained fully clothed for safety. That helped immensely to keep us back from making any really big mistakes. We agreed not to see each other's genitalia – that was important to us, and we did not fondle each other. As the relationship went on, and particularly while we were engaged to be married I would often give her massages that fell into breast touching (without my seeing them). Again… that was far enough back from the “line” that we had plenty of room for error. We repented for going past what we had established, and went on. As the husband, I confess that I did masturbate alone to relieve the tension, and agree with Dobson's teachings on the subject.
I believe that we were successful for a few reasons – first, we communicated, second, we had limits and honored each other's feelings. Finally, we stayed far enough back from premarital sex that we were safe… on our wedding night I saw Karen in all her glory for the first time, and it was remarkably special.
I will say that over the years, our sexual relationship has continued to grow as we learned with each other. Now, over 10 years into marriage, it continues to be awesome and we can truly enjoy each other. The success that we had before marriage is something that we can share with our children as counsel… and perhaps it will help others as well.
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