First as a single male and later as a married-at-24 male, I have had a number of conversations with friends single and married about the sex dilemma faced by single adults.

The traditional Christian stance on sex is that it belongs in marriage. However, the median age for first marriages appears to be rising; in 2000-2003 it was 27 for men and 25 for women, a substantial increase from 1960 when “the bride was just over twenty and the groom was under twenty-three.” While a variety of social factors are at play in these figures, what is certain is that teens once commanded to hold out until they get married in their early twenties are now growing up into adults who are presumably also told to abstain for even more years until tying the knot.

This practice is not without certain benefit. There is no such thing as safe sex–pregnancy and disease contraction are both potential results of any coupling, protected or otherwise. There is also perhaps no such thing as emotionally casual sex, either; I can’t imagine that intimacy flung nonchalantly aside does not leave at least one party feeling used, forsaken, or otherwise downtrodden. So abstaining until within the boundaries of marriage is not necessarily an unhealthy approach. Perhaps it’s ideal.

The trouble is that all adults–even single ones–are sexual beings. Even when idealistically hopeful, they can’t simply turn off their sex drive until entering into some sort of illusory marital unity of eternal sexual bliss. Here’s the question: How can conscientious, single people maintain practical sexual health without compromising their ideals, endangering their health, or harming others?

One answer, which I’ve heard many times, is that single people should just throw themselves into creative endeavors and use their sex drives to do great if asexual things. However, while single people are uniquely unfettered and therefore more suited to the sacrifices required by great thing doing, I bet they still feel a little excitable at times.

“That’s when you pray,” some might say, “until you fall asleep too exhausted to think about anything impure.”

(I’ll just mention here that this doesn’t work; there’s nothing like a little impurity to wake me up. Not that any of us should subscribe to that notion that sex is impure. Hell, it’s how humanity’s made it this far.)

These answers are unsatisfactory, I think, as are many others. All I’ve been able to come up with is the notion that until marriage, when both can be addressed in the same setting of relationship, physical and emotional needs are best met separately. Meeting purely sexual needs (although some would argue that there are no such things) should be worked out individually (minding addiction dangers) while fulfilling emotional needs should happen through nonsexual, intimate friendships.

At bottom, perhaps, sexuality in singlehood is a process inevitably muddled through–and one neither to toss about lightly nor to condemn by the many who have ourselves survived, scathed or otherwise, through our own muddlings.

I would be glad to hear additional ideas. And so, probably, would a whole lot of singles out there.

This Sunday at my parents’ church, in honor of Missions, a parishioner whom I’ll call “R” told about his recent trip to the local Veterans Affairs hospital to “minister” in the waiting room.

He’s a large man, physically imposing yet soft spoken, who experienced a high-impact conversion a number of years ago and has been tearfully grateful ever since.

At the hospital, his Gideon New Testament in his back pocket, R chose the middle of five vacant seats, and waited. Soon there entered a tall man with long hair, piercings every which way, Vietnam badges patched all over, and grubby. R said a quick prayer assuring God that this man wasn’t the one he was supposed to talk to.

“He talked too loud,” said R. “Everyone in the whole place could hear him. And guess where he came to sit–right beside me. He looked at me and he said, ‘How are you serving God today?'”

Since my theoretical qualm with missionaryism is that evangelizers don’t necessarily hold any more divine truth than the evangelized, this story was a refreshing burst of irony, an irony that I see as meaningfully parallel to that of the biblical stories of the woman at the well and the Bethesda healing.

In the woman at the well story in John 4, Jesus asks a religious and cultural underdog for a life-giving drink; she proclaims that he is a prophet. Truth wells from the invalidated? How ironic.

The irony in John 5 falls into the form of sarcasm. Jesus heals an invalid and instructs him to carry away his mat. The healed man protests to the accusing established religious authorities that he was only breaking the Sabbath’s anti-work rule because his healer had told him to carry the mat. Later, Jesus and the man meet up again, and I can just hear Jesus virtually spitting out the words of verse 14 in contempt: “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”

In my dad’s version of the Bible, by this verse’s word “sin” is scrawled, “What does this imply?” I’ve always heard that maybe the man was paralyzed because of sin, or he was healed but still sinful. Hearing Jesus speak this sentence contemptuously puts “sin” into a different light that condemns religious establishment as so skewed that its own truth and exclusivity shuts out real truth and freedom. Through his sarcasm Jesus is saying, “Yeah, right, you’re such a sinner. Whatever. Don’t cross those sinless people ever again, or they’ll do worse than scold you, in order to prop up their self-made, righteous authority!”

Could the healed man taste biting sarcasm?

In some way I think this is not unconnected to Peter’s Acts 10 vision of the sheet descending from heaven. About to be confronted with Gentile contact, Peter was instructed not to write off the unclean, for it just may be clean. While this challenges us today to reconsider that which many in the church have labeled unclean (homosexuality, perhaps?), it also calls for missionaries to be open to divine activity outside of entities routinely considered divine.

In other words, it tells us to welcome the irony.