These abstainers seem to conduct themselves more like porn stars than people with real values. Keep your private stuff between the two of you, and then I will believe you truly value it. As it stands, it just seems like another sellout, just to a different audience.

But I don't know what her malfunction is.

Assuming that this is true, what's the significance of it? That this couple should be revered as Role Models-- a term filched from sociology and promptly beaten to death for popular culture applications? Good luck with that!

I bear no ill-will towards the happy, and presumably finally gratified, newlyweds-- but this strikes me as less than the stuff of the Good Book than the Guinness Book of World Records.

My mother and her third husband waited until their wedding to kiss. They married less than six months after meeting each other, so it wasn't such a long wait.

Each of them separately felt that God was leading them to hold off, so they did. I respect that.

Now, when they asked the same of my teenage sister and her boyfriend - that was ridiculous.

Okay, well here's to them and their presumably passion free existence.

Seven year vow to no romance, no kissing for a year, here's hoping that wackadoo met her soulmate wackadoo and these crazy kids make it last.

... will be arranged marriages, where the couple don't meet till they are engaged -- or not till the wedding.

Plenty of historical and cross-cultural precedents, after all.

In respectable Victorian relationships, BTW, the couple could not kiss until they were engaged.

I'm sorry, these people are utter attention whores. Did they send out a press release?

Like competitive dieting and competitive yoga, competitive abstinence is intensely self-aggrandizing. This couple's weeeeird not-kissing thing is pure one-upmanship.

"See? We're even chaster than you Promise-keepers who kiss!".

People can do what they want, or not do what they want. But this sort of flamboyant flaunting of "their sacrifice" is inherently negative, and inherent rebuke against people who actually DO dare to kiss the one they allegedly love. Before the marriage that will seal them together, forever, for eternity bla bla. Where in the Bible is the prohibition against kissing your fiancèe?

Great that these holier-than-thou types will have "'til death" to discover they're sexually incompatible, a lifetime of awkwardness and simmering resentment in middle age to look forward to. Good luck, kids!

What's more, the pair met in 2006, but had to delay dating until a year later, when LaLuzen ended her vow to abstain from romance of any sort for seven years.

Orsino:

How now, what news from her?

Valentine:

So please my lord, I might not be admitted,

But from her handmaid do return this answer:

The element itself, till seven years' heat,

Shall not behold her face at ample view,

But like a cloistress she will veiled walk...

(Twelfth Night, I.i.25-30)

However, the lady in question only managed to keep her vow until Act I, scene v.

Many Orthodox Jews are what is called shomer negiah, literally, observant of touch. They do not touch anyone of the opposite sex outside of their immediate family. Spouses only touch for the first time after marriage. No touching before that. No kissing, no holding hands, nothing.

These are also the Orthodox communities that tend to have arranged marriages, to one degree or another. I'm amused that the Christians have now caught on.

... the video of the wedding night. Is it available?

Click on my name for explicitly chaste photos.

...their capacity to ruin our fun is exceeded only by their willingness to take away their own.

I tried to date someone once who was an absolute bad kisser. No, horrible in fact. It would make me cringe, every time he leaned in. I imagine a gold fish being similar.

Kissing is one thing I will never dismiss again. A great kiss is absolutely fantastic.

This is kind of a sad story. Seven years without romance of any kind, and during your 20's? Whether it's for "God" or because of something very bad that happened to her when she was 20, both of these people missed something beautiful about being a human being in the 21st century (romance, dating, heartbreak, even) -- and there's a sense in which that's very sad.

But there's another sense in which it's not important -- certainly less important than these "abstinence educators" have made it. If they want to live their lives this way, ok. Can't say I'd do the same -- but as long as they live theirs and let me live my (comparatively slutty) life, their choices aren't my concern. It's sad that they actually want to lead others into their lifestyle, but if those other people are down with it...ok.

Well, I'm happy for them, and for purely morbid reasons I am curious as to whether they reframed from sex on the honeymoon because they aren't planning to procreate just yet, or had sex on the honeymoon because they are planning to procreate, or were they naughty and decided to have sex on their honeymoon purely for fun.

Inquiring minds really want to know, just like how men and women have to take a sniff before throwing out the milk carton that is more than two months expired.

That sounds like an excellent way to make sure that you don't really know ANYTHING about your partner before you end up married to him.

Once in a while, when reading Cary's column, I'll wonder silently to the LW, "did you actually KNOW this person before you got married?!" when it's clear that he or she did not.

Now I have pretty good idea of how that happens.

Let's vote. Who had an awkward, nose-bumping first kiss with either too much pressure or too slack? (Raising my hand). Now, let's follow that disaster up with a direct move to the bedroom.

Do you get marital bliss?

I wouldn't bet on it. Had my first kiss been followed a few hours later by my first sex with the same equally awkward partner, my next vow would have been one of life-long celibacy.