Okay, let’s be honest. Something awful can take place during the holidays that is a complete joy stealer. During the holiday season, it is so easy to get stuck in a holidaze. Yes, I made up that word. I mean a “daze” when we scroll through our feeds and then start to think that what we’re doing isn’t enough.
The true profiteers of prostitution are pimps, traffickers, and other predatory stakeholders. As such, the commercial sex industry has devised a clever cover narrative that conceals the deeper truth of what is actually happening to those being sold, preventing the outside world from seeing the injustice.
I know you’re the nice guy, but you’re not really getting what you want out of relationships and no one really knows (or perhaps has said) why. While I know tons of people less prepared or qualified who have entered into a relationship and even marriage, I've also found a few beliefs or hard truths that have kept many nice guys’ process from being as smooth as it could have been.
I experienced every kind of abuse growing up, including sexual abuse. I started experiencing same-sex attraction and grew up being called gay, ridiculed by people close to me because of it. I was actually attracted to girls as well, but no one affirmed that in me. I decided to identify myself as a gay male when I was 17.
When I was fifteen, I was blindsided by sexual assault, and for the rest of high school, I struggled with depression, cutting, weight gain, self-hate, pornography and masturbation, fear of men, and PTSD. I was terrified of revisiting the incident so I suppressed it and went on medication to cope with my health and psychological issues.
Like a lot of women, I’ve seen the advertisements and the pictures in magazines of women with flawless skin and perfect bodies. I’ve read the articles and heard the sales pitches about the perfect hairstyle, lipstick, or piece of clothing I need to make me beautiful. I’ve struggled against the draw to compare myself to the girl next to me. I’ve heard my heart ask a lot of questions, all pointing to the main question: “Am I Enough?”
When most people hear this term, they tend to envision a young child, kidnapped, handcuffed to a radiator, locked in a room somewhere with a gross, sweaty, pedophile showing up to pay the trafficker and have his way with the young child in the room. While those scenarios may absolutely take place, that is not the most COMMON scenario of trafficking here in America.
She told us that a boy at her school kept telling her he wanted to “sext” her. Clearly this nine-year-old little boy didn’t fully know what he was saying, but when we heard this, Ben looked at me in slight panic. We both knew it was time to have a real sex talk with our daughter.
Sex and marriage have become two words that almost don’t seem to go together. It seems the narrative has become, “Husbands never get as much as they want, and wives periodically grit their teeth through it.” We have experienced this first hand in our own marriage. It has taken us years to learn how to fully enjoy sex, and in all honesty, years to understand that sex in marriage isn’t a luxury but rather a necessity.
Among the things not specifically addressed in the Bible (mainly because it was written thousands of years ago) is the intriguing world of online dating. This brings us to a few questions: Should Christians use online dating? Does dating online mean I’m not “trusting God”? How do you navigate online dating?