Sex, Religion And Relationships

When it comes to religious beliefs, there are any number of issues that can arise from discussing them, invalidating them, and bringing them to the forefront of our conversations. However, religious beliefs attribute to a great many behaviors in our lives and the lives of the women we meet and date that it warrants discussion here.

Men and women between the ages of twenty five and one hundred and five have been exposed, sometimes regularly, to the beliefs that churches hold as truth about sex and sexual behavior. Allowing the church to control what happens in the bedroom makes about as much sense as inviting the government to decide what is appropriate and what is not. Yet because we view religious affiliation as part of our family's history and culture, and so much of it is driven by guilt enticing proclamations, women in particular have a hard time breaking away from their religious upbringing and countering their beliefs with a more personally appropriate belief.

The churches of the world have a lot to offer when it comes to finding where God fits in our life and how we want to express our beliefs. Yet with a progressing environment all around us, it is hard to stomach the beliefs that were conjured up by men more than two thousand years ago. And I emphasize men. All religious affiliation was created by man's beliefs in what was appropriate and what wasn't and what their interpretation of God's will really was. Inasmuch as we like to think that men have the best interest of everyone in mind, especially when coming up with such powerful documents, women in particular were burdened with a great deal of sexual shame.

Keeping this in mind, it is not uncommon to find that someone is having difficulties breaking out of their religious families and their religious upbringing in order to find their own place among their own determination of God.

When men and women of different religious affiliations meet, there can be a certain level of religious friction that surfaces. Sometimes it is not even obvious that the friction that surfaces is religiously based. In some cases, the beliefs that we developed from the church become a belief of behavioral standard more than an outright religious belief. Those of us who sat in church every Sunday and listened to the degradation of society that was brought about by the sexual promiscuity of the local women might have developed the belief that women who are willing to go for a one night stand are somehow morally corrupt. We may enjoy them while still judging them at the same time. It gets complicated when you bring religious beliefs to the surface.

It is a common rule among social advice, never bring up political or religious conversation when you are trying to make a good impression. People often feel impassioned about their beliefs because they feel threatened by those who disagree with them. We don't get upset when someone challenges us for our choice of wallpaper or why we think we have to maintain a certain mundane routine because it doesn't reflect poorly on us. We believe, however, that our religious beliefs might make us seem like someone we profess not to be. So we see the act of challenging our beliefs to be an attack on our faith.

We can develop a certain amount of sexual confusion from just about anywhere, but there seems to be a common string of sexual confusion when it comes to those of us who were brought up in religious households. Religion tends to illegitimize sexual feelings. Religion feeds us shame and misunderstanding regarding sexual desire, and of course sexual action. The truth of the matter is we all get to choose how we feel about it by changing our core belief system.

Did you ever ask someone why they believed in their religious beliefs and they answered your question with, "That's how I was raised." So what? Just because our parents decided something for us, or even if we chose it at some point in our lives, doesn't mean we gave up the right to change our mind about it. In fact, we get to choose what we believe and how we feel about our beliefs every single day. We get to stop affiliating with a certain religion any time we want to. We can usually affiliate with any other religion or a culmination of religious beliefs if we so choose. The churches of the world obviously would prefer that this wouldn't happen. So much of their business depends on the next generation following in their parents' footsteps and belonging to the same church as they did all their life.

The sexual issues that many women have regarding their desires and what they have been taught is "right" can seriously leave a guy hanging. Maybe she is saying one things but reacting with a totally different attitude or maybe she is alluding to a specific time frame but won't outline things for you. Maybe she is so out of touch with her own sexual desires that she isn't much of a participant in bed. All of these possibilities are real to life examples (and there are most definitely more) of how sexual action can cause conflict against the religious beliefs we grew up with.

When there is an obvious issues, talking about it can be difficult but necessary. Even if you aren't planning on staying with her for an extended part of your life, you and she can cover some ground, open up her sexual desires without the threat of fear or judgment, and you can have a lot of fun as she grows through it. You will have given her an incredible gift while enjoying her in the process.

Talking about it can be particularly complicated because none of us is always aware of where our sexual dysfunction comes from. In some cases, she might just feel conflicted and not be able to identify why she feels that way. In other cases, she might not even realize that she is feeling conflicted or that she is sending out confusing messages about her level of desire and commitment and her willingness to act on those feelings.

When we have issues of our own, we tend to believe as we were taught by our religious group, that we are rather dirty and scummy men for wanting sex, for having sex, and for allowing women to like having sex with us. This can come through in any number of ways, including feeling as though we aren't good enough to be with the women we really want to be with. A lot of guys who are threatened by a strong assertive woman are so because of the beliefs about women that they were taught in church as a child. Women had a definite expectation to uphold and when they don't we feel like perhaps they are "evil" on a subconscious level. Finding the heart of many of our expectations of women can be traced back to our childhood church days and the expectations that we were given. Breaking through that is actually pretty easy once you recognize where it came from.