Answer

If We Really Love Each Other, Why Wait Until Marriage?

You love each other, and the waiting has stopped feeling like protection and started feeling like a rule that does not fit your situation. That is a fair thing to feel. Nobody asks this question looking for a loophole. They ask it because the love is real and the reason for waiting has stopped being obvious.

Wait because intending to make a promise is not the same as having made one, and physical intimacy was designed to say the second thing. The love is not in question. What is missing is the covenant the act was made to express.

Eternal Truths

Intimacy is a symbol, and a symbol says something whether or not you meant it to. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland taught in “Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments” that such an act between a man and a woman was ordained to be a symbol of total union: of their hearts, their hopes, their lives, their family and their future. Used before that union exists, it speaks a sentence the situation cannot yet support.

God attached intimacy to marriage because of what intimacy does. The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that the powers of procreation are to be used only between a husband and wife. Intimacy can begin a life, and it bonds two people whether or not they planned on it. Both of those need somewhere durable to land, and marriage is the structure built to catch them.

Governing desire is how a person becomes able to love. Alma told his son to bridle his passions so that he might be filled with love (Alma 38:12). A bridle does not remove strength. It points it somewhere.

What Can Make This Confusing?

“We are getting married anyway” is the most reasonable version of this question, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a lecture. It feels as though the promise already exists and the ceremony is paperwork. Most people around you are treating it that way too, which makes the waiting feel like a technicality nobody else is observing.

What Research Shows

Dean Busby, Jason Carroll and Brian Willoughby surveyed 2,035 married people about the timing of sexual involvement. Those who waited longer reported better communication, higher relationship satisfaction, greater perceived stability and better sexual quality. The study cannot prove that waiting caused any of it, and it says nothing about your particular relationship. It does undercut the idea that waiting costs a marriage something.

Questions to Think About

• If we are getting married anyway, what does waiting a few more months actually cost us?
• Are we deciding this together, or sliding into it late at night and calling that a decision?
• What would I want my marriage to have started with?

What You Can Do

Set your boundaries in daylight, together, before you are in the situation, and name out loud the specific circumstances that make them hard to keep. If you have already crossed lines, you can reset, and repentance is available now rather than at some later point when you feel more worthy of it. The essay behind this answer goes further into the doctrine and the research.

Jesus Christ can give you the strength to wait and the way back if you have not waited, and neither one depends on you having got it right the first time.