Essay

Desire, Waiting, and What Marriage Changes

Why Does God Ask Us to Wait Until Marriage for Sexual Intimacy?

You may have wondered, Why does God care so much about sexual intimacy? If two people love each other and both consent, why does marriage make such a difference? Or perhaps the question is more personal: If I am trying to live the gospel and marriage still seems years away, why would God give me sexual desires and then ask me not to act on them?

Those are sincere questions. Sexual desire is a normal part of having a mortal body, and the desire to be deeply known and loved by another person is good. The Lord’s law of chastity makes more sense when you understand that He is not simply placing restrictions around sex. He is teaching us what sexual intimacy is for and protecting the marriage, family, love, and power to create life that He designed it to serve.

Why Marriage Changes the Meaning of Sexual Intimacy

The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that “marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God” and that “the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.” Sexual intimacy therefore belongs within a much larger revealed pattern involving our bodies, marriage, children, covenants, and eternal family.

You are a son or daughter of Heavenly Parents who came to earth to receive a body and learn to use agency in ways that prepare you for eternal life. Your body is not incidental to that purpose. Scripture teaches that “the spirit and the body are the soul of man” (Doctrine and Covenants 88:15). What you do with your body, including how you choose to use its sexual powers, is deeply connected to your spiritual development and shapes the kind of person you are becoming.

This pattern appears at the very beginning of scripture. After God created Adam and Eve and brought them together, Genesis describes them as husband and wife and then explains that a man will leave his parents, “cleave unto his wife,” and that they will become “one flesh” (Genesis 2:23–24). The phrase describes more than physical closeness. Marriage means two people come together to build a shared life, stay faithful to each other, and take on life’s responsibilities together.

Sexual intimacy is meant to express that kind of union. The physical act says something with the body that marriage has already promised with an entire life: I belong with you. I am committed to you. We are building a family and a future together.

That helps explain why waiting matters. God placed sexual intimacy inside marriage because the physical union is meant to belong with the larger union it represents.

Camri’s Story: Learning What Real Intimacy Requires

Camri Burrell’s experience shows what can happen when sexuality becomes separated from genuine relationship and love. Her struggle involved pornography rather than sexual intimacy in a dating relationship, but what she learned about intimacy reaches directly into this question.

Camri talks about that experience in this first-person Instagram conversation.

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Cami’s story is powerful because it shows that God’s law of chastity is concerned with more than preventing a behavior. He is teaching His children how to build the kind of love in which bodies, hearts, trust, commitment, and discipleship belong together.

Elder Holland: Sexual Intimacy Symbolizes a Total Union

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland gave one of the clearest explanations of this doctrine in “Personal Purity.” He taught that marital intimacy is the “ultimate symbol of total union.” He then explained that marriage joins a husband and wife in their hearts, hopes, lives, love, family, and future.

That is the heart of his teaching. Sexual intimacy is powerful partly because it communicates a kind of total belonging. Outside marriage, two people can genuinely care about each other, feel deeply attracted, and have sincere intentions, but they have not yet made the covenant that gives the physical symbol its full meaning.

This is why Elder Holland urged young adults to wait until they could give not merely physical affection but their whole selves within marriage. His teaching is not that sexual desire is dirty or that physical intimacy becomes reluctantly permissible after a wedding. It is almost the opposite. He treats sexual intimacy as so meaningful that God has given it a covenant home where the physical gift can be joined to fidelity, permanence, responsibility, and the possibility of creating life.

Why the Cultural Message Can Sound So Reasonable

It is understandable that many people think consent and affection should be enough. Consent is morally essential, and genuine affection is good. If sex is understood mainly as a pleasurable way for two people to express how they feel about each other, then asking them to wait until marriage can seem arbitrary.

Revealed doctrine asks us to see more of the picture. Sexual intimacy does not involve only pleasure and affection; it engages the body and soul, strengthens attachment between people, carries the power to create children, and symbolizes a union God intends to be protected by marriage.

That is where Satan’s distortion can become difficult to recognize. He does not have to persuade someone that love is bad or that sexual desire is bad. He can take good desires for closeness, pleasure, freedom, and belonging and gradually separate them from the purposes God gave them. When sexual expression becomes detached from covenant, chastity begins to look like an unnecessary limitation instead of preparation for a more complete kind of love.

The distortion can work in the other direction after someone has sinned. Shame may then whisper that because you crossed sexual boundaries, you have permanently damaged your future or made yourself unworthy of the kind of marriage God promises. That also leaves out Jesus Christ. The Savior’s power to forgive and change us is as real as His commandments.

What Research Helps Us See

Research can help us notice some of the practical wisdom in what God has taught. Family scholar Jason Carroll, with Dean Busby and Brian Willoughby, studied sexual timing among 2,035 married individuals. They found that couples who waited until marriage to become sexually involved reported better marital communication, greater relationship satisfaction, less consideration of divorce, and better sexual quality than couples who became sexually involved before marriage.

Carroll explains in “Does Timing of Sex During Dating Matter?” that delaying sex can give a couple more opportunity to build friendship, communication, trust, and commitment before powerful physical attachment enters the relationship.

That does not mean waiting guarantees a happy marriage, nor does the study prove the law of chastity. It does illustrate something worth noticing: physical closeness can make two people feel deeply connected before they have fully learned whether they can build a life together. Waiting gives the rest of the relationship room to grow.

What If Waiting Is Hard—or I Haven’t Waited?

For a young adult who deeply wants marriage, the law of chastity can sometimes require years of patience. You may be approaching thirty, or beyond it, with no marriage in sight. God is not asking you to pretend that sexual desire does not exist. He is inviting you to learn self-mastery while continuing to date, build friendships, become emotionally capable of intimacy, serve others, and prepare to give your whole self within a covenant relationship when that opportunity comes.

If you have already crossed sexual boundaries, your future has not been decided by your past. Elder Holland ended his teaching on sexual purity by pointing directly to the repentance and renewal available through Jesus Christ. Through the Savior, you can confess what needs to be confessed, change what needs to change, rebuild healthy patterns, and continue preparing for a loving and faithful marriage.

And if sexual activity was ever forced upon you or your agency was violated, that is not your violation of the law of chastity. God knows the difference between what someone chose and what was done to them. Your worth, divine identity, and possibility of eternal joy remain intact.

A Few Questions Worth Thinking About

• When I think about sex, who or what has taught me what it means and what it is for?
• Have I begun thinking of physical closeness as a way to create commitment rather than something meant to express a covenant commitment already made?
• What kind of emotional, spiritual, and relational intimacy am I learning to build while I date?
• If waiting has become frustrating, what might change if I saw chastity as preparation for the kind of love and marriage I hope to create?
• If I have regrets, am I allowing my past to define my future, or am I actually using the repentance Jesus Christ has given me?

What You Can Do This Week

Take some time this week to reread Genesis 2:23–24 and the paragraphs in the family proclamation about marriage and the sacred powers of procreation. Instead of reading them only for rules, ask Heavenly Father to help you understand what kind of marriage, intimacy, and family those teachings are preparing you to build.

If you are dating, talk honestly about your boundaries before you are in a situation where desire is making the decision for you. Good boundaries do more than keep you away from sin; they give you room to learn whether a relationship has friendship, spiritual compatibility, trust, communication, shared direction, and the ability to make and keep commitments.

If you have something to repent of, move toward Christ rather than hiding from Him. Speak with your bishop when that is appropriate. If you can attend the temple, let temple worship remind you where marriage, your body, your covenants, and your eternal future fit within Heavenly Father’s plan.

Sexual intimacy is not a small part of God’s plan that He happens to regulate with a strict rule. It is connected to some of His greatest gifts: a mortal body, the union of husband and wife, the creation of children, covenant love, and eternal family. Jesus Christ can help you learn to govern this powerful part of your life with faith and confidence, and He can forgive and change you when you fall short. As you follow Him, you are preparing not merely to avoid sexual sin but to become the kind of person who can someday give and receive the faithful, complete, covenant love God created sexual intimacy to express.