Because love feels like “love” among young people until they no longer “feel” in “love.” There is no binding promise for it. Yet your heart is binding in a “forever” feeling with someone who doesn’t mean it forever. We are made to want to continue something to it’s final conclusion. You’re asking, when you start physical intimacy, to only “eat one potato chip.” It’s a poor substitute for the complete physical intimacy of marriage.
I’d suggest you read the whole thread by Augusta Sans. She learned the hard way that those guys who were experienced and whom she was intimate with before marriage did her no favors. She finally met a wonderful kind and patient man and because she was so “scarred” by her previous encounters, she had a whole lifetime of expectations this man who waited for her had to fulfill. And she almost completely lost a marriage because of it. Instead of discovering each other in matrimony, premarital intimacy sets us up for comparisons and improper or unfair expectations in early marriage. It hardens your heart in ways you cannot see while you are in the non-marital relationships. It is an injustice to the person who maybe isn’t sharing themselves with other people who might want to share a life with you.
Think of your body as a gift. Whatever you give away now won’t be available to the person who loves you enough to give you a ring and a forever promise.
Real authentic love doesn’t need to be expressed sexually. Christ was the world’s most loving man, but His love was pure. Complete. Not withholding any part of Himself. He gave His life to prove His love for us. If you look below the “feelings” of love expressed in sexual intimacy without marriage you will find inequality, one person loving more than the other, one person less committed than the other, one person using another. When it is over, one person feels used and abandoned. It wasn’t really love. It looked like love at the time, might have felt like love to an inexperienced person, but it was faux love.
And while one is doing that, one is clouding one’s emotions with feelings and hormonal release and one’s judgment about the other person doesn’t remain objective enough to see the person completely. There are so many people who wonder later “what was I thinking?” when the true nature of their “beloved” becomes apparent. Sexual intimacy becomes a hurdle to real intimacy. Relationships often become pyschologically frozen at the state where sexual intimacy took over. Because it does have a tendency to take over and become the sole focus of every “date” and encounter and meeting at the expense of real conversation, shared activities and growing to know the other person in their totality.
God does want us to express our love for people. But He has ordained it that we have a special level of intimacy reserved only for the person we marry that distinguishes them from all the others whose love for us was temporary or incomplete.
Sin is an act that lacks truth, goodness or beauty. If you look at premarital intimacy, it is not “true.” We are saying with our bodies that this is THE ONE forever. No, too often it proves temporary. Often real trust between the couple is not there. One person is usually more uncertain about the relationship than the other. Too often once the relationship is consummated (which any previous activity is just building up to that final act), one person loses interest and moves on. It is not good. It puts us at risk of STDs, out of wedlock pregnancy, broken hearts and being used. And it is not beautiful. Stolen moments when people aren’t looking, with someone whose love whom you aren’t completely sure about (are you giving yourself to them to hold onto them? A little at least?). It’s not within the context of God’s blessing and a sacred and permanent vow.
Any activity that requires the moving, removal, adjustment, unzipping, unbuttoning of clothing or the placement of hands in areas normally covered by a swimsuit, any behavior you wouldn’t do on a city street in front of a crowd of people, is behavior that belongs in the context of a REAL loving, permanent, unselfish marital relationship. Marriage is THE meaningful relationship. Even engagements don’t always lead to marriage.
Anything else is a “training ground.” And it can be bad training that warps us for real marriage. Before you are married you think every relationship might be “the one.” They all are infused with great significance and “meaning” until… they dissolve. Then they become meaningful only by their “failure” or “temporariness” or “learning experience” (which is shorthand for It wasn’t good for me, but I’m older and wiser now and won’t make that mistake again.)
Does God really want you to treat everyone the same? Do you use those actions to show your love for EVERYONE? By their nature, they are exclusive to a certain kind of relationship. Parents don’t show their children love that way. No, it is NOT completely “natural” to everyone to become sexually involved with every “meaningful” person in our lives. But our culture has brainwashed us to think that.
Limit yourself to hugs and chaste kisses and see if you don’t find a different kind of person who loves you back. The ones who are looking to use people will go elsewhere. That alone will show you how artificial those relationships are and how ultimately deceitful they can be.
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