Why wait until marriage from a girl who didn’t
With all the research I have done recently about soul ties, I have been thinking a lot about the connection I have had with my past sexual partners.
As I explained before, there are different types of soul ties you create throughout your life.
There is the spiritual soul tie you create with a person that had a major impact on your spiritual journey. There is the emotional soul tie you share with a friend that is your confidante, and there is the physical soul tie you create when you are intimate with another person.
While a physical soul tie is not inherently bad, it can be very painful when you have to break it because the relationship didn’t last.
That’s when you experience heartbreak and have to deal with an array of emotions that comes from being rejected.
And I can assure you that it is not fun. With everything that I have experienced in my past, I often wished that I had waited until marriage. But I didn’t. Even though I knew about the scripture and the importance of waiting until marriage I decided to choose otherwise.
Looking back now I also know why.
Like so many other single Christian women, the call for purity seemed like an abstract concept that I did not relate to at the time. I just wasn’t able to see how the repercussions would affect me as a person.
Well, I know better now, so I decided to do what I do best and share with you my very practical approach to waiting until marriage.
5 practical reasons to wait until marriage!
1. Pregnancy
By now you know that I like to start with the heavy hitters. So point number one is the most obvious fact of them all – an unwanted pregnancy.
And I want to preface this by saying that, yes children are a blessing.
However, I would be a hypocrite if I did not point out that the side effect of having sex before marriage is that you increase your possibility of getting pregnant before you intended to.
Even though becoming a mother is a blessing, you may have multiple reasons why you want to wait before starting a family. It could be anything from financial reasons to personal reasons. And that is totally okay.
However, if you engage in pre-marital sex it’s a risk you take.
Pregnancy scares are very common in long-term relationships and they lead to a lot of stress and anxiety, but also a lot of tension between couples.
But that is not all.
Once a child is conceived, the woman is the one who is “stuck” with the baby. And the reason why I used this word is that I want you to understand that men oftentimes have more of a choice whether or not they want to be actively involved in the child’s life.
We all know that just because you get pregnant, it does not guarantee that you will get married or spend the rest of your life with your child’s father. Therefore, you have to keep in mind that having sex before marriage may lead you down the path of single motherhood.
2. The emotional impact
Once sex becomes part of your relationship the stakes have been raised. Because now you are much more invested than if you did not sleep with each other.
I can only speak for myself that every time I was physically intimate with someone I experienced much more distress. Suddenly I became obsessed with someone I knew for as little as four weeks because I shared that intimate part of myself with him.
And the reason for that distress was three-fold:
For one I experienced a lot of shame around it. Either I would feel ashamed because of the number of sexual partners, or because I would feel like I gave it up too quickly, or because I did not live up to the expectation of the church.
I would judge myself based on all these outside ideas, doctrines, and opinions which only leads to stress.
Another emotional impact of sex before marriage was anxiety. I would get extremely anxious about the other person and the relationship. I would constantly ask myself whether I was good enough, what I could do to make them stay, and whether they were judging me for not waiting until marriage.
The fear of being rejected after being physically intimate was so high that I would become increasingly more needy and insecure at times.
While you can’t remove these emotions completely, they are much less destructive when you wait until marriage.
You will not have to feel ashamed of having sex and your anxiety won’t revolve around the need to stay with him because of it.
3. Greater relationship skills
As a relationship blogger, of course, I had to include this reason on my list of why waiting until marriage may be a great approach for you.
Far too often we get into relationships thinking that we possess the know-how needed to succeed at love. However, you learn quickly that forging a healthy relationship is a skill that needs to be learned and practiced.
As I mentioned before, once sex is involved emotions are running high and a relationship that would have been much easier without it gets complicated.
For example, you may be less likely to communicate your needs to please your partner. Or you may be less confident to draw boundaries because you are worried he will leave. And lastly, you may have a hard time trusting, given that you haven’t built a firm foundation yet.
By waiting to have sex until marriage, you get to sharpen your relationship skills with no strings attached, which will set you up for a smoother relationship in general.
4. Sexually transmitted diseases
This point is not talked about enough if you asked me. While we all love to joke about STDs, people underestimate how serious they are. According to the CDC, there are approximately 20 million new STD infections every year and 50% of them are among 15 to 24-year-olds.
But it gets worse. While STDs can have a serious effect on your health long-term, undiagnosed, and untreated STDs can cause women to become infertile.
Woah, that is serious!
Yes ma’am, having sex before marriage with someone you do not know very well can seriously disrupt the rest of your life.
And yes, ideally before you sleep with anyone you want to get tested for every disease under the sun. But how many of us actually do that? How often do we engage in one-night stands or are so in lust that all our good intentions go out the window?
Waiting until marriage on the other hand allows you to take the necessary steps to prepare yourself for this step and prayerfully guarantees that the person you are involved with takes care of their health.
So, if you have been wondering why wait for marriage? Then maybe your health is a good reason.
5. Greater clarity
I just had to keep this point for last, because it makes me giggle. You may not know this, but the reason why we experience “butterflies” when we first meet someone, is because we are on drugs.
Yes, girl!
A strong love cocktail made out of dopamine and serotonin is released by your brain when you find someone hot. These two hormones drive attraction and euphoria. They are what make us feel like we are “in love”.
But it gets even worse.
When you have sex with a person, your body now releases oxytocin, the so-called “cuddle hormone” that sends most of us women over the edge.
It triggers bonding and emotional attachment when we have physical contact and increases feelings of calm, trust, and security no matter how well you know that person.
Now you can imagine when you are high on all these hormones your judgment is clouded. You are less likely to spot or act upon red flags and you are more likely to choose a situation that you have no business being in.
And that is very tricky.
That’s why waiting until marriage, might not be a bad idea, considering that you are at least able to build trust and security gradually by observing your love interest.
So when Beyonce said she was drunk in love, she might just have talked about the love cocktail we all have sipped on before.
Did any of these five reasons answer the question “why wait until marriage?” for you?
Because I believe that it is much more important to choose to wait until marriage because you personally relate to it, than because someone else says it’s the right thing to do.
I don’t make it a secret that I have been physically intimate in my past relationships. And while I am not proud of some of the decisions of my past, I am not ashamed of them either.
Instead of shaming myself, I invested time in understanding them and finding out why I made those decisions. And that’s what you should do as well.