In today’s dating world, men who want to wait until marriage for sex are unicorns. People say they exist, but no one you know has ever dated one.

Over the years, I’ve been on a lot of dates. There’s been many that went nowhere, and three that turned into somewhat serious relationships. As a practising (if somewhat lapsed) Catholic over the last five years, I had certainly never dated a unicorn.

“Are you an engineer?” I ask, pointing to the slim, shiny ring on his pinky finger.

“No,” he replies. “This is my promise ring.”

Ancient Greece expressed much of its psychological and spiritual wisdom inside its myths. The Greeks didn’t intend these to be taken literally or as historical, but as metaphor and as an archetypal illustration of why life is as it is and how people engage life both generatively and destructively.