No Pain No Gain – Abstain

You’ve been feeling lonely so you decide to go out on the town. You figure you’ll go to one of a variety of meeting places with music, dancing, and various delicious libations, and you think that just perhaps tonight you might meet mister or misses right. For that matter, if you’re a man, you just might have a game plan going on and you know that tonight you just might get lucky. After all, luck is when preparation meets opportunity, and you have been preparing and putting yourself out there for the opportunities, right?

So there you are waiting for your latest romantic nugget, at the proverbial bar where lives are discussed, where problems are dismantelled, and where hearts are reconstructed by those pundits of life who pour your drinks in lavish cups of various configurations. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, the apparently right person approaches you, you engage in some polite chit chat, the conversation turns flirty, and the next thing you know, you are at their apartment and one thing leads to another. Occasionally such an evening adventure drags on for a few weeks, and sometimes it develops into a quasi-relationship that actually continues for a few months. Once you have been sexually intimate with a person, some amazing changes begin to take place.

After the first night of sexual intimacy the woman feels she has finally landed her man. She is a firm believer in commitment is the reward of intimacy and expects that commitment from the man she just slept with because it is wired in every woman’s very being that sexual union is the actual sealing of what makes a couple one. When you think about it and ask yourself the question, and such a question has been asked repeatedly, what indeed constitutes a marriage? Does some old preacher weaving some eloquent speech about the eternity of the circle represented by the rings make the marriage legal and binding? Does saying “I DO” in front of a lot of people determine your life-long destiny together? Does signing a document make an internal change that actually seals your life together as a couple to the exclusion of all others? Of course not.

So what actually constitutes a marriage with all its binding regulations? Sexual intercourse. Yet such a pleasurable activity is exchanged freely as if it were a commodity to be analyzed and tested before being accepted. Unfortunately for all those who participate in such a loose practice, the negative repercussions are many and rather injurious to one’s heart. A broken heart for a woman usually results in bitterness toward men and a broken heart for a man usually results in a giant callus being forged on the man’s heart resulting in the development of yet another player anticipating one more night in which he will scout the scene offering strange women a drink and introducing himself with that silly smile that makes you want to run at least a mile away from his worn-out self. The reality is actually like this: every time you are sexually intimate with a person, you are in all effects, married to them. Since there is a lot of uncommitted sexual intimacy going on in 2009, many people have actually been married to many people and the breakups have actually resulted in hundreds of divorces. Yes, they are not real divorces per se, but the real damage is bing done nevertheless.