How far is too far?

[jrainbol]

My girlfriend and I are both 20 years old and have been dating for over three years. We have known for a long time that we would be getting married soon, but we didn’t want to do it before at least junior year. We have a ten-year plan worked out and I am sticking to it. Her mother has been dropping hints for me to hurry up and ask her. We are both virgins by choice, since we are waiting till we are married. Being that we trust each other completely and I thought her parents trusted us, we thought it was okay for us to sleep in the same bed on our vacation with my mother in the next room. We trusted us, my mother trusted us, but when my girlfriend told her parents about the sleeping arrangements, they hit the roof. My girlfriend is afraid of getting disowned and we still don’t think we did anything wrong. Are they overreacting or were we really being that inappropriate?

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

Cast your mind twenty or so years into the future. Your daughter, the apple of your eye, has been dating for three years now a young man who is adamant that he is working on a “ten-year plan” that is vague on details and, for this reason, will not commit to an engagement, much less marriage, to your daughter. Your daughter and this young man have assured you that they intend to remain virgins until marriage, but you find out that they shared a bed while vacationing at his parents’ house, apparently with his parents’ knowledge and approval. Are you really going to believe that “nothing happened,” or that if “nothing happened,” nothing will happen next time?

Even if we say for the sake of argument that you have done nothing impure already, what you and your girlfriend are doing is weakening boundaries and making it more likely that you will eventually engage in unchaste activity before marriage. For that matter, by steadily dating for so long with no plans to commit to marriage in the immediate future, that in and of itself has weakened your boundaries and made it possible for you to seriously believe you did nothing wrong by sharing a bed together outside of marriage.

If you have no plans for marriage in the near or immediate future, you should not be engaged in the kind of steady romantic relationship that can either progress to marriage or end with serious hurt on both sides. Such an intimate dating relationship when you are not yet ready for marriage is what is inappropriate and can put you and your girlfriend in near occasions of unchastity, as you have now seen.

Recommended reading:

Is “steady dating” really a sin?
If You Really Loved Me by Jason Evert
Christian Courtship in an Oversexed World by T. G. Morrow