By Amy Julia Becker
Fewer and fewer Americans are getting married. Those who do are, on average, waiting longer to wed than have previous generations. But according to Time’s “Who Needs Marriage? A Changing Institution,” women and men still want to meet and build relationships with each other, so marriage remains an ideal. Because of this, reports Stephanie Rosenblum in The New York Times, online dating sites of a remarkable variety have proliferated in recent years. Some are based purely on physical appearance, others focus on hobbies and interests, while others highlight education or the type of computer you use.
Wading into these crowded waters is WeWaited.com, a dating site exclusively for virgins. Only 30 percent of applicants to the site are admitted, and they gain access through a fee and a survey designed to assess their trustworthiness. The site’s founders admit that some virgins are left out due to the rigorous screening process, while some who lie about their sexual activity make it in. But, according to its homepage, WeWaited.com mostly achieves its goal: “to use virginity as a significant compatibility tool to bring people together.”
If movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and covers of Cosmopolitan weren’t enough, sociological data back up the fact that virginity before marriage is rare in the West. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 95 percent of Americans engage in premarital sex. So WeWaited.com offers a safe space for the small segment of the population who want to stay virgins until marriage. It enables partners who value their own virginity to pair up, and it affirms the desire to remain chaste before marriage.
The founders of the site, a husband and wife team who exchanged their “vows and their virginities” on their wedding day, believe virginity is something that goes beyond physical intercourse. They see it as physical, emotional, and spiritual, and believe waiting to exchange their “whole selves” until their wedding was a blessing.
WeWaited.com (formerly called YouandMeArePure.com) is not explicitly Christian, but its view of sex as something involving the whole person aligns with the Christian view. As Wheaton provost Stanton L. Jones writes in the January issue of Christianity Today, sex has meaning, and that meaning is derived from God’s intentions for sex, not from our intentions or desires. For Christians, sex is not a merely physical act, but one with implications for gender relationships, embodiment, procreation, personal fulfillment, and God’s glory. “God made sexual intercourse to create and sustain a permanent, one-flesh union in a male-female married couple,” Jones writes.
So on many levels, providing a space for virgins to meet one another is a good thing. It affirms a biblical perspective on the purpose of marriage as well as the significance and goodness of sex within marriage. And in spite of cultural norms and sociological data that suggest virginity is impossible, WeWaited.com provides proof that it is possible and desirable, if challenging, to remain a virgin into adulthood.
Despite its strengths, the site, and the idea of Christian virgins seeking only fellow virgins as partners, poses problems. First, by narrowing the pool of potential partners to virgins, Christians run the risk of making virginity — rather than a commitment to the gospel — the litmus test of a relationship. God cares about virginity. But, as Paul wrote, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers” (2 Cor. 6:14). A shared love for Jesus matters even more than a pure sexual past when it comes to Christian relationships. Second, although Christians uphold an ethos that supports sexual relations exclusively within marriage, virginity should not become an idol. To eliminate the vast majority of the population — including a good majority of Christians — as potential marriage partners may well emphasize sexual purity at the expense of God’s power to forgive and redeem.
The Bible advocates sexual purity. Further, though, a number of passages demonstrate how Christians should respond to sexual activity outside of marriage. Jesus, for instance, refuses to condemn the woman caught in adultery (John 8). He chooses a Samaritan woman who is living with a man who is “not her husband” as one of the first evangelists (John 4). The text assumes that the women’s sexual activity will be different in the future because of their encounter with Jesus, and with God’s grace, God’s willing and undeserved forgiveness for their sin. “Go and leave your life of sin,” Jesus says.
Similarly, Paul often addresses congregations of new believers who engaged in sexual sin before their conversion. He instructs them with a message of forgiveness for the past and encouragement for new life in Christ in the future. And as Peter writes, “you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do — living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry. . .” (1 Pet. 4:3). Contemporary Americans, including many Christians, have sex before marriage. In so doing, they bring harm to themselves and to others. But God’s grace has always been able to redeem sins of the past.
Christians should be concerned with sexual purity. And it is a relief for Christians to find a safe space that does not assume premarital promiscuity as the norm. Moreover, God’s ideal for marriage includes both partners entering a covenant as virgins who give of themselves — body, mind, and spirit — only to each other. WeWaited.com implies that virginity is crucial to compatibility. But the highest concern for Christians in dating, and ultimately marriage, is a relationship based on the love and grace of Jesus Christ, the one who forgives all sin, the one who calls us to forgive one another, the one who can make all things, and all people, new.
