Intimacy Before Marriage: It’s More Than Just Sex

Intimacy Before Marriage: It’s More Than Just Sex

  July 14, 2019    Itschool

---

Intimacy Before Marriage: It’s More Than Just Sex

I’ve written at length on the blog about why we should wait until marriage for sex, and why God made sex just for marriage.

But sometimes I fear that in all of our talk about saving sex for marriage we forget that the biggest sexual temptation isn’t always a physical one. Intimacy before marriage isn’t only about sex.

And so I thought today I’d share the BIG ISSUE that often causes couples to fall in the area of sexual temptation.

Here’s the scenario: a couple decides they want to wait until marriage to have sex. Yay! That’s all very good. And so they sit down and they talk a lot about boundaries. Will we kiss? If so, for how long? 10 seconds? 15 seconds? Can we kiss on the neck, too? What about hands? Where can they go? Just on the back? Nothing under clothes? Can we ever lie down together? Can we snuggle on a couch together? Etc. etc. etc.

We tend to think about intimacy before marriage in these terms:

Physical Intimacy = Bad

Emotional Intimacy = Good

Spiritual Intimacy = Very Good!

What are we doing here? First, we’re portraying physical intimacy as a bad thing–it’s dangerous!–which often does a real number on women once they’re married, because it’s hard to flip that switch once you are married and start to see sex as a good thing.

But we’re also turning sex into entirely a physical thing, and forgetting that it is so much more than that.

We’re actually cheapening sex.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with praying together before you’re married. In fact, I think it’s a very good thing! We need to know that we can pray together and have a spiritual life together.

But here’s the thing we also have to know:

It is precisely WHEN we are praying together that we are most likely to fall sexually. It is WHEN we are spiritually and emotionally close that we are most likely to experience real sexual temptation.

And all of this applies especially to girls.

Many girls can “turn off” the sexual cues they get when they’re kissing, and can resist. We know that we’re not going to have sex before we’re married, we decide that in our heads, and we don’t let it go too far.

But when you’re praying together and feeling close, all of a sudden those sexual feelings will come on, full blast, when you didn’t really expect them. And if you, as a “good Christian girl”, have drawn up all of these physical boundaries, and have been concentrating on spiritual and emotional intimacy, you may be very surprised when all of a sudden you find yourself in a compromising situation you never dreamed of.

Get paid to share your links!

So what am I saying? That we shouldn’t be emotionally or spiritually close?

No, I’m not saying that. Here’s what I’m saying:

Intimacy is a wonderful thing, and intimacy in its fullness is meant to be experienced only in marriage.

It is wonderful to start to feel intimate before you’re married. But be aware that sexual temptation is often far more tied up in emotional and spiritual intimacy than it is in sexually “fooling around”. If you draw all kinds of lines that you “will not cross” physically, but fail to talk about what’s going to happen when you’re praying together or sharing deep memories or crying together and all of a sudden you feel tremendously drawn to each other, you’re likely setting yourself up for a fall.

Certainly talk about what you want to do physically, but I think a better conversation to have is this one: we are going to feel really drawn to each other the closer we get–closer in every way, not just physically. So let’s just set some boundaries like we won’t be in each other’s rooms late at night, or we’ll try not to hang out in an empty house too much, or we’ll have a friend that we text constantly for accountability.

The root of temptation is often not sexual, and if we make everything into something physical, we set ourselves up for inadvertent failure (and a whole lot of shame), and we also don’t present the full picture of who we are sexually.

Does that make sense? Let me know in the comments if this is something that you experienced when you were dating/engaged. When did you feel closest? How did you handle boundaries?

1. Ketsia

Everything you said is TRUE Sheila! It’s when we got engaged that we found ourselves constantly having to reset our boundaries (and ask God for His forgiveness). Because what were we doing while engaged? Talking about the future, reading books on marriage together, opening up about the past, etc etc. It naturally follows that spiritual and emotional intimacy will lead to physical intimacy. So yup, you’re spot on!

2. Emily

I have watched people struggle through long engagements (up to 2 years in one case!) and I’ve nearly never seen a compelling reason for them to be waiting.

So mostly we coped by having a really short engagement.

Four months.

Just long enough to plan a wedding and find a place to live.

3. Rebecca Lindenbach

Yep that’s what we did, too–6 months for us because we were in school and wanted to wait until we had been together 18 months before we got married (psychology research on love and all).

I think we shame people too often for getting married quickly–as long as they’re going towards the decision with wisdom and lots of prayer, quick engagements really don’t seem like a problem at all to me–and actually seem pretty biblical when you read 1 Corinthians 7!

4. Lillian

It’s a huge struggle and strain on my relationship as well. By the time we get married will have been a 6 year engagement (counting from when we know for sure we would get married). I honestly think It’s the strength of God that’s been keeping us from becoming too physically intimate before marriage.

5. Lyndall Cave

This article made me flinch, and not in a good way. As a teen I was steeped in a Purity Culture that was just as concerned with emotional purity as physical purity. That meant no feelings about guys. Period. No dreaming, no media with romance in it, and definitely no crushes. I thought my feelings were evil and my heart was a wild monster I had to beat into submission. I was a very emotionally repressed teen, which is NOT helpful for good mental health.

Anyways, I think there’s a huge difference between “Don’t have crushes because that’s emotionally impure and you’re on your way to sin” and “emotional and spiritual intimacy leads to a greater closeness and attraction between people” as a fact of life. Because of my past, I read most of the article in the tone of the former, hence my flinching. But I really appreciate the comment that greater spiritual intimacy does make physical intimacy more desirable.

Our goal in life is not to avoid sin. Our goal is to love God and love our neighbour as ourself (which means that we don’t want to sin anyway). I wish we as Christians focused less on telling people what not to do, and more on how to love and be loved