It’s the first snow day of the year here in Eastern PA. The kids are happy, school is out, which also includes my wife since she teaches where the boys attend school. Amazingly, the college cancelled their classes, so we’re all home. It’s also Valentine’s Day. I’m glad the boys and I went Valentines shopping early, otherwise we’d probably be empty handed. I’m not good at romance, after 27 years I have to admit that. I am getting better, but the strange thing is now I think Sue expects less than she did earlier in our marriage. It should have been the other way around. She should have expected less in the early years when I was a bumbling idiot at love, and expect more now that I have improved my skills! Alas. I have been working through the book Sex and the Single Savior, by Dale Martin. According to Martin, no matter how bad I am at romance, the Apostle Paul was worse. Martin believes that Paul saw marriage as a mechanism for the suppression of desire. Paul was not against sex so much as he was against sexual desire. His hope was that believers would be able to control their desire without having to marry, but marriage was an option, albeit a lesser one, for weak Christians who did not have the gift of self-control. Martin laments that very foreign to Paul are modern Christians who view marriage and romance as the height of the human expression of love, and sexuality as the normal outcome of that expression. All of this is quite interesting to me at the moment as I am teaching 1 & 2 Corinthians this semester and it just so happens that we are presently in 1 Corinthians 7, a chapter to which Martin refers in his book. I don’t think Martin has Paul right, but other options are no less comforting. 1 Corinthians 7 is one of the most difficult chapters in Paul. I am convinced that almost everything he says in the chapter must be seen through the eyes of his eschatological expectations (Famines or not. See Brian Winters, “After Paul left Corinth�). I especially wonder if any of Paul’s instructions to “virgins� (where he seems to address engaged couples) are applicable to unmarried people in the present.