Lucia

de Vernai

Read Lucia's bio and previous columns

March 4, 2009

Forget Abstinence Education: Teach Us to Parallel Park!

Women drivers continue to have an awful reputation, and I have made my contribution to perpetrate the stereotype. Whenever parallel parking is the only option, I either hand the keys over to whoever is in the passenger seat or bear 15 minutes of honking.

Sex is the easiest target, but contrary to what you heard on Spike TV's Manswers, it's not my "wiring" that's at fault. Rather, it can be traced back to the driver's ed program at my high school, which offered three days of parking instruction and two weeks of abstinence training. By abstinence, I mean "it is wrong to be gay" and "you doom yourself forever if you don't wait until marriage."

Today I know that there is more to driving than "yellow lines are the law, white lines are suggestions." I have also come across enough evidence to say that marriage may not be worth waiting for. The 50 percent divorce rate makes me think that even the tax benefits are not worth it.

The growing popularity of web sites like AshleyMadison.com prove that learning to park would have been a greater service public schools could have provided us with. The site is a meeting place for married individuals who want to have sex with other married individuals that are not their significant others. The philosophy (and public outrage-generating motto) is "Life is short. Have an Affair."

Joining the likes of LonelyCheatingWives.com and MarriedDateClub.com makes graduates of "true love can wait" curious as to what we're supposed to be waiting for. I can get cheated on without shouldering a mortgage or driving a mini-van to Chuck-E Cheese every Saturday. Since over 70 percent of the site's members are male, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is a gender thing. Boy, oh boy, where do I sign up for one of those guys?

Of course, there are plenty of married men who are family-focused, and like the school board members in my predominantly Mormon town, want nothing but purity and wholesomeness in their children's future. That was a lot easier to believe before Harvard Business School found that Utah, hub of conservative family values, leads the nation in downloading Internet porn.

In addition, the news is full of stories like that of a couple who, upon returning from their honeymoon, found themselves infected with HIV. Almost 10 years later, the woman was awarded $12.5 million in damages after a trail of e-mails proved her husband engaged in unprotected homosexual sex. Apparently, they were not registered at Macy's.

The social utility of cutting out the "true love can wait" is obvious. For one, it spares us the rude awakening that comes when we realize that all the waiting doesn't end in bliss wrapped in a bow. Preparing teenagers for a lifelong commitment is a shifty thing anyway – most have trouble with their locker combinations. But if making sure that your 16-year-old daughter is thinking of marriage instead of checking her rearview mirror seems like a good idea, at least let the kid know what she's really waiting for. And don't be surprised if she leaves skid marks.  

Click here to talk to our writers and editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.

To e-mail feedback about this column, click here. If you enjoy this writer's work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry it.