Forgiving(?) for past sins

Blunt advice:

If she really has repented and been forgiven, the issue is inside you – especially if you have a history of your own.

If you really love her, and if you really think you want to spend your life (mortal or eternal) with her, this is something you are going to have to accept – even if it means counseling of some sort. Unrealistic ideals are a horrible taskmaster, and if you can’t get a handle on this, it will cause problems for years and years until you do – no matter what your decision is in this particular case.

Ultimately, this is your decision. All we can do is provide individual perspectives – but they will all be honest, even if they are diverse.

And welcome to this forum.

I would prefer someone who enjoys and is comfortable with intimacy then someone who is freaked out about it, but I understand where you are coming from. Get it worked out first before it gets too involved.

Trueblue2012 said: “If we end up getting married I would prefer neither of us to have sexual histories.”

Since you both have histories that really isn’t possible, even if you prefer it. She may have more of a history than you, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t be a great couple. I would just evaluate how important she is to you, and how you feel about her as a person, and don’t hold it against her that she has a past (as apparently you do too). It sounds like it might be a bit of a trust issue for you? If you really find that you love her and can’t imagine life without her, that would be great start. If, however, you can’t get rid of the thought of her having other relationships and it overshadows your positive feelings, you may have to let her go.

No one is perfect, and it would be sad if you let her go because of past actions that she has sincerely repented of. Don’t know if that helps at all, but trusting your feelings, after sincere reflection is usually the best way to go.

At the risk of oversharing. :silent: DW was advised by her doctor to use a device to break her hymen prior to marriage in preparation for easier sexual relations. I felt conflicted about it. It felt like a shame to preserve the hymen for so long just to break it some weeks before the wedding. And that was over a medically advised option!!!

I never told my spouse about my feelings (even today) because I also felt wrong for having them. :shh: It was confusing and I couldn’t justify why her hymen should matter. I can tell you that by the time we got married it was a non-issue and probably helped us make our “first time” less complicated.

That being said, if this is going to continue to be a problem for you then it isn’t fair to her to continue in the relationship. She deserves to build a relationship with someone that will not hold her past against her. Maybe that can be you – maybe not.

I have a couple of cents to throw into the ring here.

First of all, from your post you sound like you’re conflicted/feeling guilty about how you’re feeling. Don’t worry about that. It’s perfectly natural for you to feel this way, given (1) the way you’ve been raised and your values, (2) your expectations in a spouse, and (3) the fact that you’re now having to grapple with something that goes against both those things.

I can tell you a little bit from the other end of things. I’d had one other partner before my husband. When I told him about it I was pretty sure that was going to be the end of our relationship. He decided (and this was a personal decision for us, not necessarily for you guys) that it was something he could live with. We got married and for the first little while (about a year or so) he would occasionally feel insecure that I would be thinking of/comparing him to that other partner. For my part, I can tell you that has never happened, not even one time, and that the experience is so profoundly different from what it was before that it’s honestly apples and oranges.

We’ve been married for quite a bit longer now and this hasn’t been an issue in a long, long time. I think that before marriage, especially (or exclusively?) in the church, we place such an emphasis on the physical because it’s like a shiny unopened present that we’ve been eyeballing under the tree. It’s new, and exciting, and it’s one of the few parts of marriage that are easily anticipated from the other side of it. Once you’re married, though, the physical stuff just blends to become a single aspect of the relationship, and not even the most important one. For example, 10-15% of married couples in the U.S. are considered “sexless,” meaning they have sex three times a year or less. The median group is at (bear with me, I haven’t read over these studies in a while, but I did actually conduct research on this topic so this isn’t just “something I read online once”) somewhere between 1-5 times a month. By volume, the vast majority of your time in marriage is spent on different parts of your relationship, like communication and trust and pesky in-laws. Also a lot is spent sleeping, working, taking care of the kids, grocery shopping, and just generally living life.

So what is it about her physical past that bothers you, then? That’s not meant to be condescending; that’s the crux of the issue. There is a reason you’re having a hard time forgiving and I doubt that reason is an inability to grasp how the Atonement works. For my (then boyfriend), he was worried that it would affect our relationship (it did, in that it made him more insecure for a while), that it would color my expectations of him (it didn’t), and that it reflected some core flaw that he might have to grapple with at some point (so far, so good). If this is something that you aren’t going to be able to get through together, I agree that you should let her go now rather than drag it out. The absolute worst thing you could do is decide you’ll “try” to forgive her and then go into marriage without being 100% there, then have that lurking in the background for both of you.

That said, take some time and do some introspecting and see what you come up with. I do think it’s significant that she is a convert; just like you spent your childhood with certain expectations about life, so did she. She didn’t have the greater light and knowledge to know the importance of chastity. Therefore, to me it looks like this is more likely to be a past-life issue than something that would bleed over into your marriage at all. But ultimately, the reality is that this is not an easy choice to make, and I can’t tell you what is right for the two of you. Good luck sorting it out!