No More Sheets
Publicist Tialer Maxwell discusses her personal decision to become celibate.
BY HOLLY CLAY.
Today’s world is so saturated in sex that to hear that there are people actively practicing not having it sounds like a fairy tale. This is especially the case in the whimsical land of Atlanta, GA where there is a strip club on every corner. The rat race to find a man is, for lack of a better word, is serious, and the city’s booming music industry provides its residents with fast paced, sex laced music to dance to. Yet none of this makes a difference to 24 year old Tialer Maxwell, a local marketing and public relations professional who has detached herself from the status quo, keeping her eyes on the prize of marriage while keeping her ankles crossed.
“I have only been in two serious relationships,” began Tialer, which is hard to believe, seeing that she is downright adorable! “With the first one, celibacy was a premise that we went on, but if I saw him during the holidays, we would slip up. I would not see him for six or eight months at a time because he went to school in Kentucky and I in Virginia. With us, our “celibacy” was more so based on the circumstances,” she explained. “But my previous boyfriend and I had been dating since 2008. We had slept together in the past, but the decision to become celibate we made together, growing in Christ and our faith. We both had the same convictions, so we had to decide if we were going to act on them or choose to not be accountable for the information we both knew was right.”
One thing that can detour someone from going the celibacy route is the idea that you can’t do, well, anything sexual. However, Maxwell clarifies that it is up to the individual or the couple to decide what they are comfortable with.
“My ex and I had different gray areas during the course of our celibacy. We had to figure out what we couldn’t do to stay straight,” said Maxwell. “I have friends and couples where they can’t even sit on the couch together because they may have sex! For us, we decided what we could and couldn’t do as we went along. There were no standing rules. For the most part, we focused on courtship. We took all sex away and practiced in God’s love.”
Now, it is important that you don’t get the wrong idea about Maxwell. Contrary to the popular ideas concerning adults who choose not to have sex, she isn’t a creepy Christian who isn’t attractive and stays to herself- someone who can maintain celibacy because no man would want to have sex with her anyway. She is a social, professional and attractive young woman who is open to dating and meeting men. And she does not buy into popular misconceptions about celibacy, one of which being that if you don’t have sex with a man during the relationship, he will not marry you.
“I don’t believe that!” she said, laughing. “Your body is a treasure. It’s about if you are going to live to God’s standard or in the world’s. It’s that simple, or to others, it’s that weird. I consider it [this idea] mass ignorance. If you don’t have sex, you will still be married and have a loving husband.”