lay out in the dirty of my mind

brb saving this to tell my future children

• Anonymous: Do you believe in saving sex for Marriage?
• John Green: I can’t answer that question unless I answer the question of what constitutes marriage. And none of the definitions I have for marriage really hold up to scrutiny:
• 1. A marriage is a legal contract. But for the vast majority of human history, marriages were not legal contracts, so are we to say that all those people—from the Prophet Muhammad to Mary and Joseph—weren’t really married?
• 2. A marriage is a life-long monogamous romantic relationship. Well, this is patently untrue. 40% of marriages end in divorce; is it immoral for those people to have had sex during their marriages simply because their marriages later ended? If I’m single, meet a girl in Las Vegas, marry her, have sex with her, and divorce her the next day—is that somehow less ethically problematic than two unmarried people in a committed relationship having sex?
• The question is further complicated by the fact that many people in the United States are legally prohibited from ever marrying. So if you argue that one must always wait for marriage, you end up arguing that gay people in New York can have sex after they get married, but that gay people in Alabama will never be able to have sex, at least until and unless gay marriage becomes legal in Alabama.
• Which brings me to the biggest issue of all: To answer your question, I must not only define marriage (which turns out to be really hard to define); I must also define sex. What is sex? Is it actions that can result in procreation? Is it any kind of sexual intimacy? If so, is kissing sex? Is hugging sex if it happens to result in arousal?
• We’ve created this aura around virginity as if one’s virginity is a real and tangible thing—but of course it isn’t. Sex and virginity are socially constructed concepts. Are you a virgin if you engage in oral sex? Are you a virgin if you’ve kissed a girl? Are you a virgin if it was just the tip? Are you a virgin if your hymen breaks from tampon-insertion?
• In my opinion, our obsessive focus on virginity and sexual purity doesn’t serve anyone. Losing one’s virginity is not an event; it’s a process. Similarly, weddings are events, and signing your marriage license is an event, but marriages are not events. They are processes.
• So no, I don’t think it’s inherently wrong to have sex before marriage, because I don’t know what sex means, and I don’t know what marriage means. I think people should feel empowered to make their own decisions about their own bodies in thoughtful and open conversations with their romantic partners.
• And use condoms. The End.