Answer

If We Love Each Other, Why Does Marriage Make Sex Different?

You may love someone and fully intend to stay together, so you may wonder why marriage matters. If your relationship already feels serious, waiting can seem like an unnecessary technicality.

That is a fair question. Marriage is more than a ceremony or a legal form. It is a public and religious commitment to share your life, remain faithful, accept responsibility for each other, and build a family together. Sexual intimacy is meant to be part of that marriage commitment, not a substitute for making it.

When Jesus was questioned about marriage in Matthew 19, He went back to the Creation. He taught that God created male and female and that in marriage a husband and wife “shall be one flesh.” Jesus was describing more than strong feelings. Marriage establishes a union in which a man and woman give themselves to each other through promises of fidelity, shared responsibility, family life, and a future together.

That helps explain why The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that the sacred powers of procreation belong only between a man and woman lawfully married as husband and wife. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland described sexual intimacy as the “ultimate symbol of total union.” Physical intimacy is meant to express with the body what husband and wife have actually promised with their lives—their love, loyalty, family, and future.

What Can Make This Confusing?

When marriage seems likely, waiting can start to feel like unnecessary paperwork. But that way of thinking can blur an important difference: physical intimacy can begin to feel like proof of love even though the marriage promises have not yet been made.

If you have already crossed those boundaries, you can repent, set new boundaries, and continue preparing for marriage. What has happened does not have to define you.

What Research Shows

In their longitudinal Before “I Do” research, Scott Stanley and Galena Rhoades found that couples who were intentional and deliberate about their relationship tended to report stronger marriages later than couples who did not. This research give couples something to think about. Decisions about sex, living together, and marriage can shape the relationship before the wedding day. If you are choosing to wait for marriage, you are not only following a commandment. You are also making a clear decision about what sexual intimacy means and when you want it to become part of your relationship.

Questions to Think About

• What do I believe sexual intimacy should mean within a marriage?
• Are we expecting physical intimacy to create a level of commitment that we have not yet promised each other?
• What are we doing now to build trust, loyalty, and spiritual unity in our relationship?