When his past isn’t so perfect

Suppose you meet an amazing man. He’s devout, mature, your best friend, you’re crazy about each other—but he wasn’t always like this. Like many deceived young people, he wasn’t always pure.

As with any guy, make sure his chaste lifestyle is the real thing. If he isn’t faithful to you with his heart, his mind, his body, or his eyes, he isn’t ready for marriage. The past should not make any difference to your relationship, but where he is today makes all the difference in the world. Only a man passionately in love with and devoted to purity is capable of being passionately in love with and devoted to you.

So time proves him to be pure and his love true, but when you love someone so much—how do your emotions handle his past?

The first thing to remember is Psalm 51:3,6: “Have mercy on me, O God… Against You only have I sinned, and done what is evil in Your sight.”

If he is a Catholic gentleman, he has been to Confession countless times since his last sexual sin. In Confession, God erased that sin. It no longer exists. In Confession, God healed and restored your beloved. The man who walked out of that confessional is not the same one who committed that sin.

Excuse me? Forgive you for what? What are you talking about?

Now if a guy wants to hear “I forgive you,” say so, of course. However, your first thought should not be for your own pain but for his. Love always thinks first of the one you love. What should bother you the most are the garbage and its effects he’s had to overcome, and that he missed having the best single years. He’s the one who got cheated and ripped off.

Of course it will hurt you. Be patient and gentle with yourself as you work through it. We aren’t God, we can’t “forgive and forget” perfectly. But we can choose to put it out of our mind as best we can. Allow no morbid or jealous curiosity. Honesty is necessary, but it should be brief and to the point. Going into details will only make it harder on our imagination later.

It may seem impossible not to fret but remember: they were not “other girls”—meaning, they cannot be compared to you. It may have been sex, but it was never making love. Breaking love is more accurate. To you he now gives love when he dies to self and stays pure with you, because your happiness, your ultimate good means more to him than anything else.

No one wants to be compared to other people in their sex life. However, if you marry a man who genuinely loves you that won’t happen, because again they are not comparable. When you love a person the pleasure does not come from performance but from nearness to the beloved. You will enjoy it and have fun simply because you are together!!! Your skill has nothing to do with his enjoyment. Your happiness is what makes him happy. The goal of love is not getting but giving. A gentleman who loves you is not focused on reaching perfection but on initiating intimacy. The simple fact that it is you is what gives him joy.

Also, the wedding night is one night. It is not the pinnacle, it is the beginning. The longer you are married the more natural and easy it becomes and the more you learn about each other. As time goes by the more you love each other, and so the better it gets, the more fun it gets, the more exciting it gets! Every happily married couple soon reaches a level of intimacy, satisfaction, and enjoyment temporary partners cannot even comprehend.

Those who turn to God lack for nothing. You have every reason to be furious with the enemy who came to rob, kill and destroy. But you can also laugh at him because God gave back to you what he tried to destroy. On your wedding night you and your beloved, for the first time, make love by consummating your marriage—because you love each other, totally, completely, and forever.

(For more on this, check out the video: “My Partner’s Sexual Past Haunts Me . . . What Can I Do?” )

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Sarah Karlyn Larue is a 25-year-old author of eight books, who loves her Faith and loves writing and is happiest when putting them together. Her latest series, That They Might Have Love is for all Catholic young women who want to seek God first in the love lives and find greater love and joy, when they are single, dating, and married.