A (No) Touching Love Story
Why I Decided to Save Physical Contact For Marriage
Translated by Sarah Levin
One of the aspects of Jewish life many people find most difficult to understand is shmirat negiah—the custom according to which men and women don’t engage in physical contact with the opposite sex before their wedding. I want to share a little bit about my own decision to observe this custom, and why I still think it was one of the best and wisest decisions I’ve ever made. I like to joke that I’m one of the only ba’alei teshuvah—that is, people who weren’t born into Orthodox Judaism, but arrived at it later in life—who started to observe negiah before they started to observe Shabbat… But what can I say—it’s true. That decision was a deeply meaningful part of my journey.
My story begins at the age of 25, when my then-girlfriend and I broke up. The relationship had only lasted for less than a year, but it was the most serious relationship I’d ever had. My heart, which had been bathing in a sea of intense feeling for her, was yanked out of the water in a single instant. My whole body ached with the pain of the new void that filled and surrounded it—the pain of love lost. I felt like I couldn’t live without her.
Heartbreak may leave you crushed and suffering, but it also has a silver lining. Between the cracks in your heart are spaces that can let a new light in. Yes, your usual fortitude breaks down, but so does the armor that you’ve built up to reinforce it—an armor that may seal off your heart from opening up to new ideas and feelings. I was in college at the time of my breakup, and I had a kind, smart friend, a religious man, in whom I confided. It was thanks to him, and to my broken heart, that a single short sentence he said was able to pierce my armor and affect me. When I casually told him that I don’t think my ex-girlfriend ever really understood the meaning of commitment, he sighed and replied, “Unfortunately, that’s the problem with an entire generation today…”
Like I said, it was just a short, simple sentence, even a trivial one. But in the right place at the right time, a short, trivial sentence can be a fatal virus that cuts through your defenses and wreaks havoc with your system. In my case, this sentence set off a chain reaction of insights that began to expand like a web of cracks on ice. A few short weeks later, the solid, frozen surface on which I was standing shattered, and I found myself plunging into new waters—ice-cold, but deeply rejuvenating.
The Distance Between Body and Heart
I began to look around me and reexamine the way relationships worked in the world I lived in—modern, liberal, secular society. How did they start? How did they end? What were their boundaries? What were the unwritten codes they followed? How did they influence us on a mental and emotional level? Above all, did they make us feel good? Was this system working?
Not right off the bat, but fairly quickly, I came to a few startling realizations. The first was that although “freedom” is the first word we would assign to our post-sexual-revolution age, much of that freedom exists only on paper. In practice, we’re not really free. For example, teenage girls and boys aren’t free to choose to keep their innocence (say, to avoid seeing much nudity, not to mention porn, on TVs or their cellphones). They aren’t free to hold off on sexual experimentation, or to marry their first boyfriends or girlfriends.
Yes, sexual experimentation can sometimes take place later in life; but only because you haven’t managed to make it happen, not because you haven’t tried (and the attempts can sometimes be desperate and extreme, particularly as you get older—in many places to still be a virgin when you graduate high school is seen as a colossal embarrassment, and kids will do everything in their power to get rid of that “burden”). Yes, you could officially marry your high school sweetheart; but first you’d have to face an onslaught of pressure from your peers to “take a break” and experiment with other partners in order to “find out what you’re missing.” It’s tough to withstand this kind of pressure, and indeed, most couples don’t. Of course, they almost never get back together in the end.
If we’re not really free, at some point this begs the question: Is it really such a good idea to set freedom so high on our hierarchy of values? Doesn’t this come with a few unsolvable paradoxes? The Monty Python comedy troupe has a famous scene with a mob that chants “We’re all individuals!” (except for one wise dissenter who says “I’m not…”). Could it be that we’ve become that herd, shouting “We’re all free!” in perfect unison just because someone’s lifted up a sign telling us to?
My second realization had to do with the model of casual dating and hookups we’ve taken up. This model entails full physical intimacy on the one hand, but only a partial and vague kind of commitment on the other. In fact, it could be argued that this model’s sole raison d’etre as an alternative to marriage is its low level of commitment—the fact that it’s easy to get out of. This means there’s a constant, inherent gap between the high intensity of intimacy and the relatively low intensity of commitment. This gap has many consequences. For instance, when each side knows that he or she can leave at any moment, and that their partner can do exactly the same thing, the possible scenario of a breakup—and the loneliness that would ensue—always hangs like a dark cloud over the couple, and descends like a fog each time they encounter difficulty in their relationship.
An image came into my head: a double bed, with a couple sleeping blissfully in it, bathed in moonlight; but next to each side of the bed hangs a softly flickering Exit sign. One lives in constant vigilance and even anticipation of the breakup. One of the most depressing side effects of this phenomenon is coming up with “backup plans” in case your partner decides to leave: you start up half-conscious half-flirtations with other people so that you will have someone into whose arms you could flee if you have to.
Add to this the fact that people are guided by media and social norms to experience a series of relationships of this kind, sometimes a very long one. There’s even a name for this. It’s called “serial monogamy.” This too has dramatic consequences. Our first sexual experience is unbelievably exciting. It’s the first time our body opens up to another person, and our first exposure to another person’s body. In a situation like this, the physical and the emotional are thoroughly inseparable. But when the inevitable breakup comes along, these two sides of us are severed from one another. The body realizes that our feelings weren’t as everlasting as we thought, and so it sobers up. Our scarred heart realizes that physical contact can be deceiving, and so it hardens. When our next relationship comes along, it’s easier for us to share our bodies with someone else, because it isn’t our first time. And yet it’s harder for us to share our hearts—for the exact same reason. This only gets worse with the third and fourth relationships. As the body becomes “cheaper,” the heart becomes “more expensive.” The easier it is to share our bodies, the harder it is to share our hearts. The end result of this process is that our body is totally “liberated”—sex is “no big deal” to us, something we can share freely with many others—while at the same time our heart is totally shut away in the deepest of locked rooms, terrified of being given to anyone.
A Sail on the Horizon
These and other insights led me to take a different look at the young religious men and women around me. Jerusalem is full of them, but until that moment they had never really interested me. They went out on dates without holding hands, strolled side by side down the streets, or sat next to one another on benches with an endearing shyness. They talked, and got acquainted, and talked some more. They were “shomer negiah,” they explained. They would get to know each other only through ongoing conversation, and when their hearts and minds told them that “this was it,” they would decide to get married. Physical touch would begin only after the wedding. They didn’t meet through arranged marriages (although matchmakers certainly sometimes helped). Rather, they chose one another of their own free will, just like us secular people. The difference was that if the relationship wasn’t right for them, they wouldn’t have to deal with the aftermath of intimate contact that had come to an end. Their hearts may have ached (after all, you can fall in love even without touching), but their bodies weren’t screaming in pain. The scar was smaller and healed faster, and it didn’t create that growing chasm between body and heart that me and my friends had experienced.
One night, a religious girl I knew from college came to a secular party I was at. The poor thing had probably expected a few friends hanging out in a living room and talking to the sound of Jazz music; the dark, crowded, deafening apartment, clouded in a haze of cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes, was a bit of a culture shock for her. I was the first familiar face she saw, and so we went out to the balcony to talk. We talked all evening, had a very engaging conversation, and then went our separate ways. But as I was walking home, a strange feeling accompanied me along the way, and I tried to figure out what it was. Finally, I put my finger on it: I realized this had been the first time in my adult life that I had spoken with a girl for an entire evening while knowing with absolute certainty that, since she was observant, nothing would happen between us. Of course, in almost all of those other cases, nothing had happened either; still, the possibility was always there in the background, so that the conversation was charged with tension of one kind or another. Here, none of those tensions were present. In their place was a kind of unfamiliar quiet, a quiet that allowed for another kind of conversation to take place—a gentler, more honest conversation, one free from the possibility of “it.” Later, I would learn that this quiet has a name in Jewish sources. It’s called nekiyut da'at, clarity of mind.
That very night, as I lay in bed, I felt the first glimmer of a possibility, like a tiny sail on the edge of the horizon, that I too could one day get married without being intimate with my wife before the wedding.
The Space Between Us
The thought began to follow me wherever I went, like a little, secret bird flitting around me. It dawned on me that it didn’t make me feel so bad. For example, I started to pay attention to how much mental energy I’d been devoting to the fantasy of having a sudden, exciting sexual misadventure. The more I put this fantasy aside, the more I could concentrate on the things—and people—that really interested me. I started to make better use of my time. My inner senses sharpened. I was on a great journey to discover spirituality and Judaism, and when I cast aside my nagging drive for instant gratification and fleeting experiences, I could give myself over to this quest with all the mental and emotional energy it deserved.
About a year after I broke up with my girlfriend, I took it upon myself to save all sexual contact for after marriage. I didn’t have laws or clear boundaries. I came up with the rules as I went along. For example, holding hands was okay, and so was a kiss on the cheek, but anything beyond that was a question, and full intimacy was off limits. I marked my transition to this new era with the celebratory replacement of my double bed with a single bed, just like the religious singles I knew had in their bedrooms. It’s hard to describe the enormity of the relief that came with that step. It was as though I had finally gotten rid of a loud, overbearing roommate who had taken over the entire apartment with his noisy chatter. What a sweet silence reigned when he moved out! A year later, as part of my general decision to start observing the Torah’s commandments, my abstinence took on the contours of Jewish law: total avoidance of physical contact with women, as well as of what is known as yichud—being alone with a woman in a closed room.
It sounds extreme, I know. And it’s true, it is a little extreme. But as I learned from my own experience—and as is readily evident to any observer—the whole story with sexual desire is always extreme in some way. There’s no configuration of sexual desire with day-to-day existence that doesn’t have some extreme element to it. Not for nothing did the Jewish sages write that “there is no steward” when it comes to sexual desire, i.e., no one is immune to it, and at the same time, that the world can’t exist without it. It’s the pulse of life itself.
I’ll admit: It wasn’t easy. There were moments when it was very hard. There was even a moment when I thought I was going to crack. I cried and railed against the predicament I had put myself in. How had I gotten myself into this mess? Now that I’d gone on and on about this topic with everyone I knew, it was humiliating to retreat. A dear friend comforted me by sharing that in the Talmud, it is said that when the Jewish people were informed of the Torah’s sexual prohibitions, they all started to weep. My own tears turned to laughter: if the entire Jewish people who came out of Egypt had cried, it was okay for me to cry, too. It really is hard.
Despite those few moments, though, it was a wonderful period of my life—the very best of my time as a single person. I lived in a hip neighborhood of Jerusalem (Nachlaot, in case you know it), explored my relationship to Judaism, and went out with religious girls. Those were years full of searching and confusion, of hope and disappointment. But there was also a kind of thin blanket of quiet joy draped over all of it, a sense of purification and cleansing. I felt that I was preparing myself for the real thing.
Then, four years after the breakup and three years after my decision to abstain from sexual contact, I met her. She had grown up in a religious home, but she was divorced with a child, and so had seen a thing or two in her life. We hit it off very quickly. As early as the second week, I knew something serious was going on. Five weeks later, I proposed to her, and to my utter delight, she said “yes.”
In answer to your question: Yes, the fact that we abstained from touching did speed up our decision-making process. It tends to do that. But there are two sides to that coin, and it’s important to acknowledge them both. On the one hand, unrealized sexual desire can be misleading, and one has to be wary of this. On the other hand, there’s also that clarity of mind I mentioned earlier, which abstaining from touch makes possible. This clarity of mind helps us to understand faster what’s right for us, and especially what isn’t. It’s no coincidence that the Hebrew term for having a vested interest in something, not being objective about it, is noge’a ba-davar, literally “touching the matter”: Touch entangles us with the other person in a way that takes away from our power of judgment. The converse is also true: Abstaining from touch creates a certain distance, a space that makes it possible for us to make better decisions.
The Way Home
Like every other human being, some of the decisions I’ve made in my life have been good, and others less. The best decision I’ve ever made was the choice of my wife. But a close runner-up to that decision, and one that’s inextricably connected to it, was the choice to do so while abstaining from physical touch. That choice gave our fateful decision to get married a depth and a weight that would otherwise not have been possible. Years into our marriage (which, thank God, is now approaching the end of its second decade), that decision has continued to enliven and strengthen the connection between us. The fact that we chose one another lucidly through the space between us, and that we crossed that space only after we entered into a covenant with one another, is a powerful memory to lean on. It wipes away all kinds of unnecessary doubts about whether, and to what extent, it was sexual desire that swept us into the relationship. We know for sure that it wasn’t that. It was us.
I know what many of my readers and listeners will want to say to me: I had a “luxury” that those born into religious homes don’t have: the fact that I got to experiment with physical relationships, and arrive at the conclusion that it wasn’t right for me. And it’s true, as the saying goes “no one is wiser than he who has experience.” Here’s the thing, though—that’s true of everything in life, but it doesn’t mean we have to go through everything in life. Someone who’s experienced mortal danger will appreciate life more than someone who’s never faced that risk. Someone who’s struggled with a disease will appreciate health more than someone who’s always been well. But it takes only a little bit of common sense to see just how absurd it would be to suggest that we should (God forbid) put someone’s life in danger or infect them with a disease for the sake of the insights that could help them reach!
Yes, in a certain sense, someone who has been through intimacies and break ups and made his way out will come out the better for it. Someone who falls and fails in that area needs to pick themselves back up and set things right. But wouldn’t you agree the ideal should be to find “the one” through the least tortuous road?
The words “holiness” and “purity” aren’t just religious buzzwords, or faded letters in some ancient book. They’re a very real gift that we can give ourselves and our children. They’re the best and the fullest response to a world that has lost its way. They’re our way home.