Why no sex/sexual acts before marriage?

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anneramones

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Why God doesn’t want us to give pleasure to ourselves by sexually connecting with another person or alone by masturbating?
Isn’t it natural to have sexual urges?
Why is it wrong to have pleasure?
I understand why no contraception and abort, it’s killing. But who do you hurt by having sex between consenting adults?

By the way I’m not complaining with the not having sex commandment( and yes, I know it also includes other things, not just sex), if God said so than be it, I just want to understand why. In recent times I have lost my understanding of this matter. Please help me reaffirm this commandment in my heart. Thank you.
 
Because it goes against the natural order. Life isnt all about pleasure. The sexual act is about giving oneself totally to the other spouse. Gods wants every sexual act to be:
1)Marital
2)Procreative
3)Unitive

Fornication and Masturbation go against these 3 ends of the act.
 
God designed sex for two things: bonding and babies.

We talk a lot about pregnancy outside of marriage, we nearly never talk about bonding.

The pair-bonding hormone, Oxytocin, is released when we are sexually aroused, we are flooded with it when we experience an orgasm. It is also released during breastfeeding to bond a mother and child. (this same hormone in smaller amounts bonds friends to each other and bonds us to our pets).

This is why you will see people overlooking terrible behavior in their partner, even violence and abuse, because they have a strong pair bond (think of how a mother can catch vomit in her hands and not wince if it is her own child).

Getting that pair bond hormone with no other person does not sound like the way to develop a healthy person, does it?

There are many studies, this will start you off:

 
anneramones said:
Why God doesn’t want us to give pleasure to ourselves by sexually connecting with another person or alone by masturbating?
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Because the pleasure is the effect of sex, not the purpose. Don’t get me wrong, the pleasure side of it is a very good thing and is something to be treasured… but it is not something to be pursued for itself.

Here’s an analogy. Painkillers have the purpose of removing pain. To do this they have numerous effects like reducing heart rate, calming, and dissassociation. Those effects are not the purpose of the painkillers and someone who takes them because they want that feeling of being outside of themselves is abusing them.

Sex is for the communication of love and unity between spouses. It is about that love overflowing and possibly giving rise to something else. If you are pursuing sex for your own pleasure you aren’t communicating that love. You are instead lying and reducing yourself and your partner to objects for use and abuse.
anneramones said:
I understand why no contraception and abort, it’s killing. But who do you hurt by having sex between consenting adults?
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You don’t understand why contraception is wrong, because it’s not about the killing, it is about turning a good act towards bad ends. Sex is supposed to be ordered towards the unity of spouses and the creation of life. Deliberately sterilizing the act removes the second part of that.
anneramones said:
By the way I’m not complaining with the not having sex commandment( and yes, I know it also includes other things, not just sex), if God said so than be it, I just want to understand why. In recent times I have lost my understanding of this matter. Please help me reaffirm this commandment in my heart. Thank you.
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I applaud this attitude, because God’s commandments are not arbitrary. Sex in its proper context is meant to reveal something about God and his relationship to us. Looking deeper into this issue will help you see what he calls spouses to do and part of why marriage is a Sacrament.
 
What we know for sure is that God created us as man and woman and we would be married and joined as one in marriage in order to be fruitful and multiply. JP II referred to marriage as the preternatural sacrament in his Theology of the Body, ie it existed before the fall, as part of creation. We know this because Genesis makes it clear that after Eve was created, Adam and Eve were married. Even Jesus referral to this same passages of Genesis.

One cannot separate the pleasure and unitive aspects of sex from the procreative. And as shown above, the procreative aspect was defined as part of marriage.

One can always ask why God created us a certain way and not another. But one cannot deny the logic and the beauty in the way God chose. Which makes the question as to “why He did so?” rather pointless.
 
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Pounding a nail is a good thing. It is part of building a structure.
Why don’t we use our foreheads to pound the nail?
Or why don’t we use a shoe?
Or your wife’s crystal candle holder?
 
Looking at what’s happened in the US is easy to see the results of sex outside of marriage.

Often the people below the poverty line are single adults with children. This is not good for children, the adults, or the nation. Children need 2 parents and ideally the adult would like to have a committed partner to share in life’s joys and burdens.

Sexually transmitted diseases have increased in the population as well as the types of diseases you can catch. This is not good for people or the nation.

Unexpected pregnancies often mean that there is a demand for the back up of abortion. This is not good for babies obviously, and it’s not good for women or the men, and it’s certainly not good for a nation to kill it’s own people.

Recreational sex, which has gained popularity with the access to contraception, has really been a slow motion train wreck. Those above statistics don’t take into account the heart break involved and the damage done.

God designed sex to be within the context of marriage and it’s a good design. To step outside of those boundaries is to take on risk.

Love, real love, does not ask a woman to take on the risk of pregnancy without the commitment first. That’s what selfishness asks.
 
PennyinCanada said:
Looking at what’s happened in the US is easy to see the results of sex outside of marriage.
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Your post is basically the longer version of what I was going to say. Which is that sex outside of marriage is, in general, bad for society. It can also be a disaster for an individual.

In short, the well being of people takes priority over pleasure.
 
I absolutely agree, and yet I am resistant to use that as a main line of argument. It’s too easy to get from that to the idea that we would be able to have lots of sex outside of marriage if only we could prevent these pesky side effects. It’s too easy for someone to say “well of course I don’t trust everyone to be able to do this, but I have myself in order, I should be able to do this.”

Of course it is good to look at evil results and try to avoid them. It is even better to look for the incredible good (understanding and closeness to your spouse and to God) that could result and try to work towards that.
 
Sex often produces children and the ideal situation is that the child gets raised by a mother and father who are committed to each other. It is possible for a child to be raised by a single mom or single dad, but that is not ideal. Indeed, sex is pleasurable and it can be a glorious act when it’s done by a husband and wife.

A hammer has a purpose; to drive in a nail. It can also be used to crack someone’s skull in half, but that is a misuse of the hammer. The purpose of sex is for an enjoyment of mutual pleasure and affection between a married couple. You can fornicate, but that is a misuse of the gift of sex. Though you can misuse sex and a hammer, they have clear purposes and to take it outside of that purpose is wrong.
 
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TheLittleLady said:
we nearly never talk about bonding.
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I completely agree. This is one of the main problems with pre-marital sex and it’s rarely discussed.

You can’t discern if someone is the right spouse for you if you’ve tricked your brain into thinking they are, due to bonding chemicals. When I talk to secular people about saving sex for marriage, this is my main argument. I’ve seen so many people stumble into terrible marriages because, deceived by sex, they were convinced they were “soul mates.” In most cases, if they’d stopped having sex for a month, their true relationship situation would have become clear quickly.

Not having sex before marriage is God’s way of protecting us from mistakes.
 
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It also helps to picture yourself happily married to the love of your life. At that time, if you’ve had previous boyfriends, you will not be thinking, “Oh, I learnt so much from those guys and experienced such pleasure.” Rather you will be thinking, “I wish I’d never known those previous boyfriends.”

You want to give yourself wholly to marriage, not as a fragmented individual with a history of pregnancy scares, and diseases, shattered hopes and dreams, a torn out heart, or worse, a heart that never trusts fully anymore. Plus every year spent with a common- law husband that doesn’t work out is one less year with your actual husband.

The secret is to drop non-marriage partners quickly and get on to the good guy.
 
Lara said:
you will not be thinking, “Oh, I learnt so much from those guys and experienced such pleasure.” Rather you will be thinking, “I wish I’d never known those previous boyfriends.”
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Lara said:
a fragmented individual with a history of pregnancy scares, and diseases, shattered hopes and dreams, a torn out heart, or worse, a heart that never trusts fully anymore.
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As someone who did not enter marriage as a virgin, this is not my story. I cared for my boyfriends, they were good people. Right now I could pick up the phone, call any one of them to say “I have an urgent thing, can you assist me?” and they would even through we have not spoken for decades.

No diseases, no torn hearts, no trust issues, etc. I think that these sorts of statements turn people away from the Gospel. If I were a secular person, and you said this to me across the dinner table, I would burst out laughing.

If someone has these results from a relationship, there were more problems in that relationship than pre marital sex.
Lara said:
Plus every year spent with a common- law husband that doesn’t work out is one less year with your actual husband.
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Not sure where you get this. Boyfriends are not in a circling pattern waiting until there is a landing strip available.

Pre-marital sex does build bonds with people, from my experience it takes about half as long as you were with that person for that bond to fade. With a sexually active (I include in this people who “make out” as that releases the hormones) partner for a year, it takes a 6 months of no contact for those bonds to ebb. Pre/extra martial sex is sinful and can be a gateway to other sins like contraception.

Sins are forgiven in Confession. We can repent and amend our lives. We are not somehow ruined persons because of sins, even sexual sins.
 
As Fr.RIpperger states in his talk on the 4 stages of Courtship, we should not be even be holding hands with a person of the opposite sex until after the engagement. Touching and and grave sins like fornication does build bonds, but the bonds are not good because by physical touch one person attaches to the other, usually the women, which can lead to heartbreak and trust issues when an uncommitted relationship breaks down. Plus by sexual sins before marriage a male is dishonoring the female.

 
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LittleFlower378 said:
Fr.RIpperger states in his talk on the 4 stages of Courtship, we should not be even be holding hands with a person of the opposite sex until after the engagement.
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These are his opinions, not the teaching of the Church.
LittleFlower378 said:
Plus by sexual sins before marriage a male is dishonoring the female.
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Have tried to respond to this at least seven times. Men and women are each responsible for their own sin or their own avoidance of sin.
 
I’m not disagreeing with you on either of your 2 statements above. But so also what Fr.Ripperger is saying is true. Everything doesnt have to be either/or. There can be a both/and you know.
 
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I like the Fr. Rippinger video because he discusses the dangers and meanings inherent in the stages of courtship. I think the recommendations he gives for what is appropriate in what stage are overcautious but the reasoning behind them is worth paying attention to. I think couples that approach tenderness and touch from a position of love and honor can do more than he recommends. Couples that are uncertain of what they are saying by their actions are better off playing it safe.
 
Upon reading your post, my first response was to go to the “babies and bonding” argument, but since it has been made a gazillion times before, I shall simply add by saying that the bonding (in part at least) is life long, and is responsible for so many train wreck relationships where everyone around a couple can see that it is a bad relationship, but the couple can’t.

Apart from this, I would like to turn to Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body which explains that sex is a renewal of the wedding vows, made with the language of the body, in the absence of wedding vows, any sexual act is inappropriate, this is why masturbation is immoral. There are 4 mandated marriage vows that the Catholic Church has, which can be simplified down to “free, total, faithful, and fruitful” even in marriage, these vows must be renewed by all sexual acts, so masturbation, contraception, and any act that cannot produce life are out. Before marriage, it isn’t total or faithful, because a person is not giving all of themself to the other, and only that one other.
 
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