Answer

Why Does God Ask Me to Save Sex for Marriage?

If you are keeping the law of chastity while most people around you are not, the question is fair: what exactly is this for? It can feel like a rule about reputation, or about God being uncomfortable with bodies.

He is protecting two things, and neither is your reputation. The possibility of creating a life, and the bond that forms between two people whether or not they meant it to. Both are enormous, both happen regardless of intent, and marriage is the structure built to hold them. Chastity is a boundary drawn around something valuable rather than a restriction placed on something suspect.

Eternal Truths

Your feelings are not the problem. This is worth establishing before anything else, because shame gets there first for most people. Sexual desire is part of the body God gave you and part of His plan for marriage. What is asked is governance, not absence. Alma told his son to “bridle all your passions, that ye may be filled with love” (Alma 38:12). A bridle directs strength rather than removing it.

The power to create life is why the stakes are set this high. The Family: A Proclamation to the World declares that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between a man and a woman lawfully wedded as husband and wife. The commandment sits where it does because of what the capacity does, not because of how anyone feels about it.

What Can Make This Confusing?

The casual framing appeals because it lowers the stakes, and lower stakes are more comfortable. If sex is just an activity between consenting people, nothing much rides on it. That framing is not neutral. It makes the thing smaller so that the boundary looks arbitrary, and then the boundary is the only part left to argue with.

What Research Shows

Studies of sexual timing in relationships have found that later sexual involvement is associated with better relationship communication, satisfaction and stability, including in research from BYU’s School of Family Life. These are correlations rather than proof of cause, and they cannot tell you anything about your own future marriage. They do make it harder to argue that the timing is irrelevant.

Questions to Think About

• What do I actually believe this commandment is protecting?
• Where has shame been doing the work that doctrine should be doing?
• What have I decided in advance, and what am I leaving to the moment?

What You Can Do

Decide your line now, before you are in a situation that asks. Then tell one person you trust, so the decision lives somewhere outside your own head. If you have already crossed lines, this is a commandment with a Redeemer attached: you can repent, reset, and go on. The essay behind this answer takes the doctrine and the research further.

Jesus Christ is not embarrassed by your desires, and He can help you govern them without shame.