Is it great when you wait? Part 1

By Catherine Portland.

After decades of Cosmopolitan teaching single women how to snare their man with great sex, there is a new movement brewing in the dating world. The seasonal publication of new self-help guides has been dominated by a handful of advice books advocating chastity as the ultimate seduction tool.

Dawn Eden and Kate Taylor are leading the 'born again virgin' movement. Eden is a former groupie who now believes that casual sex is a "con" and freely admits that she has had enough experience of it to both to base this on extensive research and risk a charge of hypocrisy.

Both her and Taylor claim that sex serves to block love, not make it, and advocate that single women wait… and wait… and wait. Eden writes like a woman who has been deeply burnt, describing the process of waiting until she was 23 to lose her virginity to a "man I didn't love" as "just a blip on the continuum of my sexual degradation… The decline had begun when I first sought sexual pleasure for its own sake."

Taylor's Not Tonight, Mr Right, reads less like a therapy masquerading as memoir and more like the self-help guide it is supposed to be. Her premise is simple; withhold sex from a man and he will fall in love with you. She openly champions this as a "manipulative" stance, promising her readership, who she presents as raring to march up the aisle, that it will speed up the whole process of dating and engagement.

She argues that men are less inclined to instantly start fantasising about a long-term relationship when they meet a woman, whereas if you ask women to describe their ideal fling it will sound suspiciously like ideal mate material. The aim, she contends, is therefore to turn men's initial curiosity and interest into something more akin to love and withholding sex is apparently the answer.

In evidence she quotes an American study of 200 people. Men, it was observed, found their partners less attractive and sexy after they first slept together, whereas the opposite was true for women. This echoes Eden's argument that women will always feel bonded by sex whereas men are more able to detach and roll over.

Taylor concludes that it is "obvious" that women should wait, so the question becomes how long for? The answer is apparently dependent on what you want and how old you are, with Taylor thankfully resisting the urge to spell out the tick-tock of the biological clock.

She writes: "'How long should I wait?' And that all depends what you're looking for. Love? Then you might just want to hold off until you're 100 per cent sure of your partner's affection for you. For those in their twenties who aren't looking to go wedding-dress shopping any time soon, this is probably the best choice.

"Engagement? It's not as daunting as waiting until your wedding night, but, equally, it's not as safe if marriage is the only thing you’ll settle for." Luckily I'm still a couple of years short of my mid-thirties so can discount her advice about waiting until the wedding night.