Dear Talk Shows: Withholding sex will not make a man marry you

I get really peeved whenever I see a TV talk show discussing the reasons men sometimes don’t want to get married, because they always say the same things and never offer any solutions. I believe it was Dr. Phil the other day who was saying that the number one reason men don’t get married is that they can get sex without marriage. So, basically, the old “buying the cow” thing (a very insulting metaphor to women, by the way…for some reason we get touchy when we’re compared to cows).

Now, if you flip that around and look at it from the woman’s point of view, here’s what it seems like Dr. Phil, Tyra, and all those other quasi-experts are trying to tell us. It seems like they’re saying, “If you want to get a man to marry you, you shouldn’t be having sex with him without a ring on your finger.” And it doesn’t feel like they’re saying it in a Christian way, like they think sex before marriage is sinful.

But is that really what men want? If you’re a woman and you’re in a serious relationship with a man, serious enough that you’re thinking about marriage, and all of a sudden you see this talk show and say, you’re right, I should stop having sex, what will the man think? One minute you’re his loving girlfriend who he’s hopefully serious about too, the next you’re withholding sex to get what you want, and your relationship is now cold and sexless. Would that really be a conducive environment to romance and wanting to take things to the next level?

Once you’ve established that you have a sexual relationship with someone, you can’t just turn it off. And since almost every other woman on the dating scene doesn’t subscribe to this withholding sex before marriage rule, what would be keeping the guy from simply finding a girlfriend who will have sex with him?

And by the way, why is all of this on the woman? Why do we have to control our output of sex like it’s something we don’t want, and we just do to manipulate people? It seems almost like we’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.

So I say, if your man is shallow enough that he thinks marrying you is like pointlessly buying a cow when he can get the milk for free, dump his ass and find someone who respects you as a person and not just a sexual object. How about that?