Don’t know how I missed this:
Devout, married Catholics have the best sex of any demographic group, the Family Research Council said at an event Wednesday, pointing to a collection of studies from the last several decades.
The socially conservative Christian group relied heavily on statistics from the University of Chicago’s last National Health and Social Life Survey, conducted in 1992, which found the most enjoyable and most frequent sex occurring among married people, those who attended church weekly – any church, whether Catholic or not – and people who had the least sexual partners.
The most important component of this study are the “people who had the least [sic] sex partners.” Those individuals practice a liberating temperance.
Temperance, one of the four cardinal virtues, promises a unique form of freedom: that of discipline. As the Catechism explains:
[t]emperance is the moral virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods. It ensures the will’s master over instincts and keeps desires within the limits of what’s honorable.
Chastity, of course, is the application of temperance to sexuality. This, I assume, relates to “those who attended church weekly – any church, whether Catholic or not…”
Now, I am not going to argue that if one abstains until marriage, he or she is guaranteed sexual satisfaction. However, I will argue that every man and woman wants to feel loved and desired.
To abstain means communicating a simple message to your partner: You’re worth waiting for because I love you unconditionally.
It also says that sex is not a tool for one’s own masturbatory pleasure; it is a fundamental act of affectionate love, procreation, and intimacy that helps define what it means to be human. It is an act that entails intense spiritual, emotional, and physical connection between two different people.
That’s why abstaining couples are so happy within marriage: They feel special, they share something unique, and they accept life and the “self-gifts” of each other.
