When I was single, saving sex for marriage seemed easy peasy. And of course it was — there wasn’t anyone around to test my resolve.
Truthfully, I didn’t date much. I had a handful of relationships before meeting my now-husband and while all of them involved moments I’m grateful to not relive — one time a roommate doubled back to make a lot of noise before entering because she’d seen us through the kitchen window making out and that was enough embarrassment for my lifetime thankyouverymuch — the struggle to save sex for marriage with those guys paled in comparison to the experience I had dating the man I’m married to now.
I knew very quickly that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, so with my heart all in... well, it was difficult not to have my body follow what my brain was telling me about our future. Here was this incredible guy, the man I wanted to spend every minute with and knew without a doubt that I wanted to build a life with — I wanted to melt into him every time we kissed goodbye. How natural and beautiful to want to be connected so deeply.
But of course, the Catholic Church is pretty clear on its stance about sex before or outside of marriage. That intimate union is reserved for marriage alone and maybe you, like me, heard that repeated in many ways as a teenager.
Or maybe that scene from Mean Girls is burned into your memory and you’ve been relying on fear to get you through waiting for marriage (aka when it’s acceptable to your Catholic family to start having babies): “If you have sex, you WILL get pregnant. And die.”
… not quite the solid reasoning for abstaining that helps when you’re feeling deeply attracted to someone you already know you want to marry.
My husband and I struggled. Hard. It was months of trying new rules for our relationship every week, heading back to the confessional at the same frequency, and questioning everything we’d learned about saving sex for marriage.
We knew we’d be married in just a few months, so what was the difference between now and then? How would that day make it all of a sudden okay to have sex?
Right after our first very romantic and cozy Christmas season together — and afterwards, desperate for something to actually help us keep our hands off each other — I asked my priest friend this question through a mess of tears and frustration:
“Why does it matter? Why does getting married all of a sudden change things?“
He looked at me with immense kindness in his eyes for a moment, and then replied:
“We just celebrated Christmas, the event that showed us how important God made the order of things.”
He paused, perhaps for dramatic effect or to see if I understood what he was getting at. I gave an encouraging nod for him to continue.
“A sacrament requires two parts: word and matter. Wedding vows — your consent, the words — precede bodily union — the matter — because that’s how God intended it to be. He wanted it to be clear, so he did the same thing himself.”
Another pause, this time surely for dramatic effect.
“At Christmas, the Word became flesh.”
That priest proceeded to share more about how the order God did things in really mattered. I’d heard that phrase, the Word became flesh, from the gospel of John my entire life, but never as part of an explanation to save sex for marriage.
The order matters. Not arbitrarily, not as a perfunctory chant akin to “yes Miss Trunchball” to placate the scary principal, but as an objective reality that God, in his immense kindness and generosity, showed us that the correct order of things will bring peace and joy to the world.
(Cue the cute kids dressed up as angels singing “joy to the world” every Christmas.)
The safeguards that God and subsequently the Catholic Church have put around sex are like the banks of a river; by keeping the water contained, it actually becomes more powerful as it flows toward the ocean. Living outside of those safeguards subjects us to flooding and destruction.
A quick google search to see if the idea that saving sex for marriage is backed by more than just faith communities shows that yes, couples who wait until marriage report higher relationship and sexual satisfaction, better communication, and less consideration of divorce.
It makes sense that having sex with someone you’re undoubtedly committed to brings about that kind of fulfillment, especially since your brain quite literally bonds to that person in a neurochemical way every time you engage in that kind of physical pleasure. That bond isn’t meant to be broken, in fact it’s a huge part of helping to maintain unity in marriage, which is often why breaking up with someone you’ve been intimate with is more difficult than if you hadn’t.
Reserving sex for marriage isn’t just about the act, either, but rather about giving your entire self to someone else. In marriage, we’re offering our life to the other person without holding anything back in any area.
Saying those wedding vows in front of family and friends shows that you’re truly committed to your life together. You can still walk away from a relationship before marriage, but if you mean it when you say “til death do us part” then you’re promising to be devoted until the end of your life. Those words matter. And the actions that follow carry more weight to them, too.
Some people will make it to the altar without having sex and it’s just reality that a lot won’t. But the truth is that it’s never too late to begin again and experience that deep, overwhelming joy that saving sex for marriage offers.
If you didn’t choose to wait before you met the one you’re about to marry, or perhaps you’ve chosen not to wait with each other, you’re still able to reorder things. God’s mercy is new every morning — every hour, if necessary — and you can choose to accept the grace he wants to give you. He’s not gonna yell at you, shun you, or give you the silent treatment for having sex; he wants you to experience the peace that comes by using the safeguards the faith has in place for this intimate, beautiful, and holy act.
Waiting for marriage to have sex might not be easy, but the benefits of doing so are worth the wait. The right order of things — word, then flesh — is for good reason.
Want to dive deeper into the meaning of marriage? Here are some recommended resources.
