Opinions Expressed in "Rants," while informed by Catholic doctrine, are merely the opinions of the author.
The TWILIGHT Series and Pre-marital Sex
So in order to get in touch with my inner teenage girl, I’ve been reading the TWILIGHT book series, by Stephanie Meyer – just finished it as a matter of fact.
Wasn’t bad – was no HARRY POTTER mind you – but it was an enjoyable read.
The story is about this girl named Bella – who falls in love with this vampire named Edward – but he’s a nice vampire, only eats live game, not people, and apparently he’s studly-good-looking too, so all the girls say, as they scream when he comes onto the screen at the movie theatres, just like they used to for Fonzie.
Who’s Fonzie?
The whole vampire storyline is really inconsequential – at its heart, TWILIGHT is really a story about two people who are passionately in love – and one thing that really struck me was the approach that the story takes to sex.
Bella, the human girl, wants to have sex with Edward – Edward does too, but holds back for a number of reasons: 1) he’s afraid he’ll get caught up in the passion and excitement and accidentally bite her head off, 2) he wants to honor her and protect her and not use her, 3) he keeps saying, he’s old fashioned, having been born in 1901, so wants her to MARRY HIM FIRST, and 4) there is some reason to believe he was using her desire to have sex, but her fear of getting married, in order to delay her becoming a vampire as she wanted to, but he didn’t, blah, blah, blah, its complicated.
Anyway, I was struck when they finally have sex for the first time, it was their wedding night, and Bella is hiding in the bathroom, preparing herself for sex with Edward, and she gets nervous. The book reads:
“… I was freaking out because I had no idea how to do this, and I was afraid to walk out of this room and face the unknown…. This felt exactly like having to walk out in front of a theatre full of thousands with no idea what my lines were…. How did people do this – swallow all their fears and trust someone else so implicitly with every imperfection and fear they had – with less than the absolute commitment Edward had given me? If it weren’t Edward out there, if I didn’t know in every cell of my body that he loved me as much as I loved him – unconditionally and irrevocably and, to be honest, irrationally – I’d never be able to get up off the floor.
But it WAS Edward out there, so I whispered the words “Don’t be a coward” under my breath and scrambled to my feet. I hitched the towel tighter under my arms and marched determinedly from the bathroom. Past the suitcase full of lace and the big bed without looking at either. Out the open glass door onto the powder-fine sand….” (pg 83)
Etc. Etc. Etc.
We make ourselves extremely vulnerable when we have a sexual relationship with someone. Vulnerable to humiliation, to rejection, emotional trauma, physical pain – the list goes on. Pregnancy and STD’s are just the tip of the iceberg of what is risked. Even if we're unaware of it, or choose to ignore it, in sex, we make an emotional, psychological, biochemical connection with them, which if broken, will cause deep pain and trauma. So it takes an incredible amount of trust, trust that is so often violated when sex is merely casual, doing incalculable damage. And we might kid ourselves into thinking that it isn’t hurting us at all, but deep down, our unconscious is crying out STOP!! I CAN’T TAKE THIS!! And our self esteem, our sense of our own beauty and dignity, takes a beating.
So I think it’s AWESOME the way the book writes about this first sexual experience. Because it takes place AFTER marriage, the main character, Bella, doesn’t have to worry about taking such a huge risk – she KNOWS Edward’s love for her, that she can trust him completely, certified by the COMMITMENT to love that he has made her in their marriage.
And this is one of the BIGGEST REASONS that the Catholic Church has that rule – you know, the one to not have PRE-marital sex. It’s to protect us. It’s to allow us to experience sex the way it was MEANT to be experienced – free of fear, with absolute trust, absolute commitment, completely UNCONDITIONAL love. That way sex can be as beautiful and as awesome – as GOD CREATED IT to be.
Quote taken from BREAKING DAWN, Part 4 of the TWILIGHT Saga. Written by Stephanie Meyer © 2008. Published by Megan Tingley Books: Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group USA, Inc.