Why I Chose to do the 30 day Abstinence Challenge with my Boyfriend and Why I would do it again
By: Margaret Ferrer
Tags: Spiritual Growth, Personal Growth, Christian Living, Love

Why I Chose to do the 30 day Abstinence Challenge with my Boyfriend and Why I would do it again Margaret Ferrer Apr 11, 2019·5 min read

April 11, 2019

“A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back-to-back and conquer” (Ecclesiastes 4:12 NLT)

I believe intimacy comes in many forms: Physical, emotional, and spiritual to name a few. To start off 2019, my boyfriend and I decided to do this 30 day challenge where we abstain from the physical intimacy in our relationship. This challenge was hard, not just because we both struggled with not being physically intimate with one another, but because we learned a lot about each other on a much deeper level and some of the topics we talked about was difficult and heavy. During these 30 days, we covered 4 of what we believed to be most important to each of us, which was purity, temptation, pre-marital sex, and marriage. We learned about what each of these topics meant in the bible and what it means to us. Although this is coming from a Christian point of view, I feel like there are some universal truths that I will be talking about. My goal is to reach out to other girls who may be going through what I’ve gone through or perhaps build a community where anyone can feel free to share their own experiences. It doesn’t matter what gender or religion we identify with, what matters is having a voice and having courage to use it.

I lost my virginity at the age of 14. I went about my life after that telling myself that I lost it to someone who cared, at least. The phrase “at least” shouldn’t be in our vocabulary. We shouldn’t settle for anything less than mediocre. As I grew older, I didn’t think about the consequences of losing my virginity. I became even more sexually active and didn’t think anything of it until I did this 30 day challenge. It opened up a lot of the things that I kept hidden in my mind. I was vulnerable.

My boyfriend and I have only been dating for 7 months, but have known each other for 7 years. It feels like we are always learning something new about each other. We always tell each other that we’re building a home together and part of that is building a strong foundation.

“The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock” (Matthew 7:25 NIV)

I love this verse because this is the relationship that I want to be in. A relationship that will be strong enough to overcome any obstacles. Even if we trip a couple times, we’ll never fall because we’ve built this strong foundation. The first step was inviting God to be at the center of our relationship. At the beginning of our relationship, we didn’t put God at the center and at the time it didn’t affect us but looking back we weren’t growing in other areas of our lives.

We broke down the month of January into four weeks and each week we discussed a topic. The first week we talked about purity. Coming from a Christian background, I struggled with this understanding of purity. As I began to explore this concept of purity in the bible, I learned that being pure isn’t just about tainting your body in a sexually immoral way, but we are constantly tainting our bodies by filling it with negative emotions. We have the tendencies to be angry, to hold a grudge against someone, to be filled with contempt. All of these negative emotions are weighing us down because we haven’t learned to forgive those around us, but most importantly, we haven’t learned how to forgive ourselves. This was something that I struggled with myself. For the longest time I never forgave myself for the things that I’m not proud of. After talking about purity, I’m now slowly redefining what purity means to me.

The second week we talked about temptation. Everything that we do has consequences. I learned that we don’t just “fall” into temptation, but we are dragged by the things we desire and this is something that I learned in the bible. We don’t fall into temptation because we are capable of making our own decisions and sometimes we CHOOSE the wrong thing. Some of us are tempted by the physical bodies of the people around us, some of us are tempted by money, and some of us are even tempted by a pair of shoes or social media. There are these strongholds that we place in our lives and it is something we have to break. If we want to be able to grow, we have to let go of some of the things that are weighing us down.

The third week we talked about pre-marital sex, but we couldn’t talk about that and not talk about marriage at the same time so we ended up combing the third and fourth week together. This was the second hardest topic to talk about next to purity especially when the topic of marriage was brought up. Don’t get me wrong, I do think it is too early to be talking about marriage, but at least we know where we both stand with marriage. I think the reason why marriage was the hardest topic to talk about because he challenged my thoughts about marriage. Before he came into my life, I was sure about marriage. I knew I wanted marriage when the time came, but he made me think about what marriage meant to me and that stumped me. I never really thought about what marriage meant to me. Before I came into his life he was content with living with bachelor life, which also made talking about marriage hard because he didn’t think about it. He wasn’t sure if he wanted it. Now, after really understanding what marriage means to me, I realize that marriage to me isn’t the end goal. Marriage is never truly the end goal. I learned that just because you are married, it doesn’t mean you stop there. The journey still continues.

My take away, from this experience is that it feels relieving to be able to talk about heavy topics with your partner and understanding one another on a deeper level as well as understanding where they stand. I would choose to do this experience again because we were growing closer together and I felt myself grow a lot because of this 30 day challenge. I learned a lot more about myself because I wasn’t too focused on the physical aspects of my relationship. I barely explored the other aspects of intimacy. I’m looking forward to going even deeper in my personal growth.

Margaret Ferrer