A magnetic attraction to beauty
Even as a young boy, I remember being attracted to beautiful girls. It wasn’t lust. I didn’t even know what sex was. I just felt an invisible, magnetic pull towards their beauty. My little boy crushes were common.
I remember repeatedly holding onto and smelling one of our couch pillows. A blonde girl had used it during her stay at our home with her missionary family. I thought she was so beautiful, angelic-like, and the shampoo she used made the pillow smell so good. Smelling that pillow allowed me to hold onto my feelings for her, although I could not have expressed them at the time.
Sex naivety, I felt the social oddball
During my early teenage years, I felt like my naivety and lack of curiosity about romance and sex made me a social oddball.
In grade 8, I saw one of my classmates put on a black ball cap with printed bold white letters, “I love sex!” I remember thinking to myself, “I don’t even know what sex is.” My parents, my school, and my church had never talked to me about such matters.
I felt strange seeing the peers I had grown up with moving into this mysterious and uncharted territory.
My first exposure to nudity
Despite my attraction to beautiful women, my first exposures to female nudity were shocking. I attended a birthday party for my friend and we watched a movie in the basement. Suddenly, there on the screen mature women were exposed.
I quickly diverted my eyes and waited for the parent present to fast forward the movie or turn it off, like my parents did if there was even a hint of any sexual suggestion. The movie played on. I didn’t know what to do with that experience.
One day in grade 9, while walking home from high school, one of my friends pulled out a porn magazine. I didn't know what to do. In fear I pretended to ignore them, and simply walked ahead of them, not wanting to look at the images.
The more I saw my peers dating and getting physically involved, the more I awkward I felt. It was like they were living in a totally different moral universe.
Social alienation
In grade 10, my social supports fell apart completely. When my family moved to small town so my dad could be a pastor, I failed to make any friends at my new school.
I still had to spend my recesses, lunches, and school bus rides within earshot of my peer group. I soon overheard all the juicy gossip about who was sleeping with whom. Suddenly, circumstances forced me to live close to the party crowd I had previously avoided.
I was terrified of relating to my new peers. I hardly spoke a word for two years and spiralled into depression.
Sensual stirrings
Due to my social awkwardness, I felt like a social misfit. I started to believe that there was something seriously wrong with me. I was bored, lonely, and disappointed in myself. I was in a dark place.
That fall, something within me shifted. I suddenly found my eyes not only captivated by attractive women, but had a strong longing to be with them romantically and sexually. I found myself curious about the female body, something I had previously judged my friends for.
I discovered images in advertising and TV shows that allowed me to explore my sexual curiosities without getting into trouble. Both printed and digital media radically shaped my desires for beauty, romance, and sexual pleasure. And they were my primary experiences of these things. I was suddenly obsessed with looking at images of beautiful women, and entertaining romantic and lustful thoughts.
In a matter of weeks, my actions became habit.
Guilty and confused
Growing up in a conservative Christian home, I felt guilty for having these new sensual curiosities. I didn’t dare let anyone know I was entertaining them. Because I was so concerned about outward appearances, I kept my outward persona of a good boy, while secretly looking at sensual media to stimulate myself.
Part of me envied my peers for how they could live out their desires without hindrance. I sometimes resented my Christian morality which restrained my actions and my ability to fit in with my peers.
Despite my new habits, I was losing hope that I would ever experience a real dating relationship. What attractive girl would like a loser like me?
One day I overheard two girls in my class talking about guys who use porn. “They use it because they can’t get a real woman to sleep with them.” I felt they were right.
And so for much of my teenage to adulting life, that is where I stayed, secretly entertaining media-fed fantasies and distant from the very girls I wanted to get to know, or had interest in, but had no clue how to relate to.
What motivated my obsessions?
Why did this powerful combo of romantic and sexual desire for beautiful women feel like the ultimate kind of love that I just had to experience?
My soul was in pain. In my new context, I felt like a complete outsider. I was desperate to feel loved.
I thought if I could just experience impassioned physical attraction, romance, and sex with a beautiful woman, then I would know that I was lovable. But only attractive and socially adept people, I believed, were desirable and worthy of love.
I didn’t feel like one of those people. I failed to possess those magnetic looks or a personality that could attract such beautiful women. I was socially unable to enter into, let alone sustain, the intense states of physical attraction and romantic chemistry that I saw on screens.
In university and my early work life, my dating history was a confusing string of romantic relationship attempts that got messy, flopped, and fell apart. I was stumbling from one infatuation to the next.
It wasn't until much later that I realized that these relationships probably failed because they were primarily based on the kind of beauty and attraction I had seen on screen—which were no help at all in learning to relate to real women.
Finding a new way
In university, I took a step of courage and started to confess my sexual sins to a few trusted Christian friends. I found out many were struggling with the same temptations. I wasn’t alone.
We learned to confess and pray for one another regularly. I learned to be authentic and receive forgiveness and grace.
By God’s grace, I was able to serve in ministry alongside many fine godly women. God worked through my friendships and failures with these women to help me see more than their beauty or sexual potential. I got to know and value their person. God was making me into more the man he meant me to be—and preparing me to be a husband.
I was very open about my struggles with the girlfriend who is now my wife. It was hard to confess my sexual sins and at times they felt like deal breakers. The grace and forgiveness she showed me is purely from God. She has forgiven me when I could not forgive myself.
God used male accountability, female friendship, and my marriage to restore me to a more healthy attraction to beauty, romance, and sex.
Beauty worth worshipping
If one thing is evident, I have an innate desire to worship, adore, and be one with beauty. And, next to God, for me, what other being is so tempting to worship than a woman of beauty? It is no coincidence that so much of our language, when describing the beauty of a woman, has the ring of worship.
God has me in process of renovating my affections. I have a great need to follow the beauty I see in bodies and souls back to the fountainhead. I need to trace beauty back to its source, my maker. My soul's desire for love and beauty can only be met in God alone.
My problem is not that I fail to worship, but that I have misplaced my worship. I have made lesser things—beauty, sex, and romance—ultimate. I am constantly tempted to worship the physical and soul beauty in the best humans out there instead of the creator. But no human beauty or romance can satisfy these insatiable desires of my heart. They aren’t magnetic enough or substantially good enough, neither do they last.
I have been distracted from real beauty, the beauty of God.
Beatific vision
To be honest, I still struggle to see, experience, and speak of God’s beauty. I still often get more enamoured with the beauty of a woman who is attractive to me. Yet if God is everlasting beauty and the creator of all physical and soul beauty, I can only find my ultimate satisfaction in his beauty.
I struggle to see his beauty because I cannot physically see it now; one day I will. In this life I have to deepen my gaze into his character.
As I am drawn to God’s beauty more and more, I find that there is no fading of his beauty or corruption of his soul. This is why he is the ultimate beauty my soul craves, and worthy of my ultimate worship.
As I draw near to his beauty, I see the ugliness of my soul. But it is in this realization that I find the inner transformation of a forgiving and gracious God who cleanses my soul. Jesus is my only hope for my beautification. He takes my foul and dirty sin and gives me his righteousness.
His love is unconditional, and it's transforming me.
It's taking a long time to redeem my notions of beauty, romance, and sex. I so easily fall into old patterns and habits. I still get attracted to beautiful women and entertain thoughts of romance or sex. But I am getting better at being open about that, confessing it to my wife and brothers in Jesus, turning away, and repenting. And asking God to redeem and change me from the inside out.
