Sex, love, and all of the above

by Jenna Blakely

It may be an awkward conversation with your parents, a shiny new promise ring if you’re a girl, or maybe a lesson from your health teacher drilling “sex is bad!” into your not-quite-fully-developed teenage brain. Yes I am talking about abstinence, and yes it’s 2011.

TV shows have evolved from prohibiting couples to sleep in the same bed, as in “I Love Lucy,” to heavily emphasizing getting drunk and engaging in meaningless sex, as in “The Jersey Shore.”  Simultaneously, abstinence has lost popularity. However, even though our society seems to pick on virgins and send out “have-a-lot-of-sex-with-everyone” messages through the media, abstinence has managed to retain high social value in the opinions of many sexually active college students today. Even if it may be a dying trend, it’s certainly not dead.

Unlike some couples today who choose more casual paths of dating, Brandon Sackett, 20, and Ashley Brandenburg, 22, share a deep connection, a radiating love. They have the kind of connection that most of us are in search for, if not now, at some point in our lives. Sackett knows without hesitation that her favorite color is yellow and her favorite food is ice cream, and Brandenburg knows that his favorite color is green and that he absolutely loves General Tso’s Chicken from Yang’s Gourmet House. Ironically enough, after separate interviews with each of them, when asked the question, “What attracts you to one another?” They both had the exact same answer and said it was the other’s ability to be so “loving and compassionate.”

“I knew I wanted to marry her around the second year of dating. I knew this girl was the perfect package and can remember thinking there is no one else that could even compare to Ashley. I called it my ‘Ashley Filter’,” said Sackett.

Now, after five years of dating, Brandon felt ready to take it to the next level. Around Thanksgiving, without Ashley knowing, he asked her parents out to breakfast and asked them for permission to marry her.

It all started nearly five years ago, when they met through Perrysburg High School’s 2006 spring musical, Beauty and the Beast. He walked her to her car after rehearsal where he had placed flowers in the passenger seat without her knowing. He proceeded to ask her to be his girlfriend, and now, on December 18th, 2010, at his family Christmas party, he was about to ask for her love again. Except this time, he got down on one knee with a ring and said, “Will you make me the happiest man in the world and marry me?” With instant tears of joy, Brandenberg said yes.

What makes this couple stand out from the rest is not only their apparent, glowing love for each other, or their impressive four year commitment at such a young age, or even the long-distance they have endured due to their individual schooling, but rather, the fact that they are abstinent. They have promised to wait to have sex until their wedding night, which is set for April 20, 2013; their seven year anniversary. Brandenburg said, “I feel like it will just make the marriage that much stronger and more special.  The first time that you experience sex with your husband or wife will be so sacred, and you will both know that they are the only other person that you have shared that feeling with.”

Madeline Schmidt, an Ohio Advocate member of Bowling Green State University studying communication health, said that 90 percent of people are sexually active today without necessarily being married, a fact she learned while in training for the advocate group. Ohio Advocate specifically promotes “comprehensive sex education” in high schools, especially those that teach only abstinence. While she believes abstinence is the safest option and should still be stressed in schools, Ohio Advocate works to ensure that sex education in high schools doesn’t stop with abstinence, but fully educates students in all there is to know about sexual health and birth control. Schmidt says, “I think it’s great if people decide to wait until marriage to have sex, after all it is the safest option. It takes a lot of willpower to do that in today’s society and I give them props.”

For Sackett and Brandenberg, while it has been a hard decision, they do not regret it. Brandenburg believes sex plays an important role in any relationship, and when people have sex purely for pleasure it can blur the line between love and infatuation.

“I feel like sex is meant to be shared with one person only.  It is the coming together of two people who have promised to love and take care of each other till the end of their days.  I believe that sex is supposed to be pleasurable, but that’s not its only purpose.  Sex can give people the feeling that they are in love when maybe that is not really the case,” said Brandenburg.

Schmidt agrees with the idea that casual sex can sometimes create confusion, however she is not against it and believes sexual freedom can be a positive thing as long as the people engaging in it are being careful. “When it comes to relationships though,” she said, “people can take sex for granted and abuse it. If you have sex too soon, how do you build a relationship from that?” She has personally seen a lot of “friends with benefits” situations fail, because one person always seems to develop an emotional attachment. That’s because sex, no matter how cold and robotic the media portrays it, inevitably creates emotions.

Bret Isner, 22, an Ohio State University food science major believes that the media has been a driving force in portraying sex too casually. “Social media has ruined sex by taking out the emotional aspect of it and then people view that and internalize it as normal,” he said. Liz King, an Ohio University communications major seconds that notion. She said, “I think it’s respectable to wait until marriage, but a lot of people don’t do it because of how heavily casual sex is stressed in today’s culture.”

With the raunchier TV shows like MTV’s “Jersey Shore,” the risqué music like Akon’s “Sexy Bitch,” or the less-traditional romance flicks like No Strings Attached starring Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman, Madeline points out that whereas media is clearly a factor, it’s not the only one. Religion is a factor as well.

“Religion typically stresses abstinence, and today it seems that a lot less people go to church,” Schmidt said, and indeed, it seems to be the case. Two sociologists, Kirk Hadaway and P.L. Marler conducted two studies, one in 1993 and the other in 1996, that looked at the relationship between people who say they attend church regularly versus the amount that actually do attend regularly. After taking attendance and then interviewing the churchgoers, what they found was that in both studies about half of the people who reported attending church actually attended. Out of 40 percent of self-reported Protestant churchgoers for example, the study found that only 20 percent actually attended.

Brandenburg agrees that religion has been a huge influence in her relationship with Sackett, and she refers to their relationship as one centered around God. They both grew up Catholic, but as she said, “we didn’t really feel like we made a connection with God from the teachings that we learned,” so they began to attend a non-denominational church, Cedar Creek, and fell in love with it. With that said, religion is not the main reason behind why they are taking a vow of abstinence, rather it was a personal decision based on their view of sex and love as two powerful entities that tie together, unlike the media’s portrayal which often separates love from sex.

This separation of love from sex has arguably contributed to America’s infamous divorce rate. “I think that people in our society don’t take marriage seriously anymore. People get married all the time for reasons other than love, such as kids or infatuation,” Brandenburg said, “Marriage is no longer seen as the covenant that it is meant to be.”

Sackett agrees that today’s casual sex culture correlates with divorce, but he believes it contributes to other factors as well, such as an increase in teen parenting and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases like HIV and AIDS.

“I feel that sex has been downplayed in today’s society causing people to lose their virginity at such a young age,” Sackett said, “…the increase in single parenting as seen in shows like ‘Teen Mom,’ just shows me that sex is seen as no big deal anymore. What 16 year old is mature enough to raise a child?”

Although Sackett and Brandenburg are one of the rare couples today engaging in this nearly “extinct” tradition, it appears that the general consensus of sexually active college students and young adults today actually admire and respect that tradition.  Not only that, but many recognize the dangerous influence the media has on society by portraying sex as purely for pleasure. As Schmidt said, “Future generations may experience problems at the rate the media is abusing and over-amplifying sex.” Whether it is STD’s, unplanned pregnancies, or the distorting of true love. Sex before marriage definitely has its consequences.

However Sackett and Brandenburg don’t have to worry about any of those consequences. As Sackett said, “In the end it will be truly worth it. It’s a decision I know I will never regret making.”