Here’s my additional 2 cents: Waiting’s not hard. Plenty of people are like Connie, and I say that as a 20-something with plenty of a-religious friends in the San Francisco Bay Area. You only get all the remarks Crowder dealt with if you make an issue of your abstinence.

Though I often disagree with Mr. Nickol, I think he nailed it this time. Virtue is, in effect, its own reward, when I hear those who preach virtuous choices as guaranteeing much future happiness, well, I just want to find my own rusty spork.

I have had similar disappointments along the way in the area of parenting, and after 33 years I can preach that results certainly are not guaranteed.

Understandable as her comments may be, I think she has unnecessarily taken offense and would find Crowder much more sympathetic than her remarks make him out to be.

David Alexander,

This was one of my first thoughts. There was something in the author’s enthusiasm for his own choices (“in-your-face joyfulness,” as I called it in a comment that I either neglected to send or that didn’t make it through) that was off-putting. Perhaps he protested too much. It made me think of things I have read by Catholics who are committed to, and practice, NFP devoutly wishing that other Catholics trying to promote NFP would not make such extravagant claims about how glorious the experience was, how it brought husband and wife together, how it made sex so much more meaningful, and on, and on. Good for them if that’s their own experience, but as they say on television commercials, “results may vary.” If virtue were a guarantee of unalloyed pleasure and happiness, and if doing the right thing was not often a struggle, we’d have a world full of saints. Steven Crowder, it seems to me, is preaching a kind of sexual prosperity gospel.