Getting married for sex (grace, churches, bible, quote)

[Condemned]

As I alluded to in a thread somewhere around here, I used to go to a very strict, legalistic church that taught prohibition of divorce based on the bible. Like the bible (well the New Testament at least), they taught that divorce was only acceptable in cases where a spouse was caught in the act of fornication and even then, they could not remarry (I'm not even sure the New Testament says you can't). That created all kinds of problems but there is another church teaching that trumps that one.


Not too long ago, divorce was very much frowned upon and in churches, it was practically forbidden, but today, quite a few churches have come to accept it as a part of life and does not preach against it with the same vehemence as in the past. It is still discouraged, but allowed with the idea that we are humans who make mistake, but God is forgiving and while not his will or design is understanding enough.

Well, while churches may differ on their teachings about divorce, the idea of fornication is supposed to be out of the question. No matter how old or young you are or how horny you are, the bible is against fornication. There is no way around it or no verbal gymnastics that can be applied to this one like other passages in the bible.

So what is the remedy for this according to the bible? Get married. It is one thing when someone is 30, 35, 55 gets "saved." They may have had years of neck breaking partying and sex under their belt already and can bare to take some time off, but how is a 19 year old virgin supposed to deal with this? Where I come from, they were told they were to get married and this is what the Bible teaches. After all, "it is BETTER to marry than to burn (lust) [with passion"] according to a verse in one of the books to the Corinthians.

Personally I think this sets up all kinds of obvious problems down the road and a newspaper article I read from one of the more sexually repressive places on earth which also happens to be a "Christian" nation, proves this. They interviewed a few relatively young people who at 29 and 30 were already old veterans at marriage and many of them (mainly the guys) admitted they were not happy and had not been happy for years. They admitted that when they looked back, they realize that they essentially got married to have sex legally in the sight of God. These were people who either grew up in the church OR became saved in their late teens.

In my old church, I will admit you had older folks who were in their late 30s and were already married for 20 years and miserable to no end, used to actually try to encourage some younger folks to hold off on marriage and not rush into it. Great advice, but that was a hard sell to young, hormone driven children busting at the seams who wanted to just explode in a matrimonial bed. While other parents in the world are trying to their kids to keep their draws on, there were some people in my church trying to get us to keep up our pants AND also hold off on marriage all at the same time. Talk about a tough order.

The result was, lots of my peers got married at very young ages. Coupled with the fact that the church had a disproportionate amount of women in comparison to men and eligible ones at that, there were young girls marrying 35 years old men or 35 year old women marrying 20 years olds. Talk about a marriage counselor's headache.

Those scriptures encouraging marriage to prevent fornication:

Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.

I Corinthinans 7:2

For I (Paul) wish that all men were even as I myself. But each one has his own gift from God, one in this manner and another in that.
But I say to the unmarried and to the widows: It is good for them if they remain even as I am; but if they cannot exercise self-control, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion.

I Corinthians 7:7-9

[Huckleberry3911948]

dont get me wrong i love the church however
the church tells it how it aughta be not how it is
getting married to have sex is like like trying to buy milk at a hardware store.
recent poll of women with kids at to sex frequency
60% 1x a week
30% 1x a month
5% never
5% wild variations

[ArmyPoohFan317]

Part of why the Bible says (and I paraphrase) to save sex for marriage is that God knows the heartache that is involved in ended a relationship that was sexual. If we are honest with ourselves, than most people will admit that it was easier to get over relationships that ended before sex was part of the game. God is trying to protect us from ourselves and from un-needed pain.

Also, people who only have sex with their spouse are a lot less likely to get an STD. Now, I'm sure that there were fewer STD's when the Bible was canonized, but God is outside of our time and HE knew that in the 20th and 21st C's we would face this issue, so waiting would be a good idea health wise. God isn't capricious. There are reasons why He tells to do something and not do others, and if we are unbiased we can eventually figure out those reasons.

That said, this is one of those things that is hard to do in our society, and I'll admit, I like sex. God made it a fun activity (maybe so that we would be willing to follow the order to "be fruitful and multiply"). Unfortunately I'm not married, so when I participate in that activity, it isn't such a good idea.

But, the question is how does the Church catch up with the times? I won't quote any stats because we can all find different stats to back up the position we hold, that is the joy of statistics! But, we do need to figure this out, because there are problems if a 19 year old gets married just so that he/she can have sex and not feel guilty before God. Sex is a bad single reason to get married. So how do we fix this?

Sex is not going away, and our culture's fixation on sex is probably not going to change anytime soon. So there has to be a solution. Part of it has to do with just learning to control and refocus our desires. People do this all the time...not everyone over the age of 16 is having sex right now, and lot of those people not doin it probably are horny. So we learn to refocus or pray and move on.

Also, the question of masturbation comes up. Is masturbation an okay method of dealing with the need for sexual release? That is something for the individual to decide, but could be a temporary solution.

I know it doesn't totally answer the original post, but those are some of my thoughts. Someone way smarter than I am needs to ponder this and put in his/her 2 cents.

[Condemned]

Thanks Amy. I also forgot to add that, if I recall, lust is also a sin and some will tell you that in order to masturbate (well at least us guys) you have to focus on an object to lust at (I just found out women can masturbate and NOT actually lust) and as a result, you're sinning by lusting.

So let's see, you are not supposed to lust and if you can't control your lust you should get married and after the novelty has worn off, the lusting subsides and you wake up and smell the coffee and realize you made a mistake, you can't divorce unless you can prove your spouse is fornicating.

Talk about some serious stress an backed up pipes.

[mackinac81]

I think the OP has a point. I began going to church at 18, and I was surprised at how many people my own age were engaged, married or talking about marriage by the time they were nineteen or twenty. I'm twenty seven and a little over half my christian friends are married now. Thankfully they're happy in their marriages. I've wondered if lust had something to do with it. I mean, sexual attraction is an element in any relationship. BTW My non christian friends are still enjoying the single (albeit sexually active) life.

Don't get me wrong. Sex should be saved for marriage, and not just for morality's sake either. Sex does take relationships to a whole new level that makes a potential breakup much much harder down the road. If I weren't a christian, I probably still wouldn't want to have sex with my girlfriend for that reason alone.

[ArmyPoohFan317]

Sex is one of those hot button issues. God created it to be good and wonderful, but in the right context. Too many of us want to take shortcuts (i.e. un-married sex, marriage at a very young age, etc.).

I think of the guys I've slept with and while I learned that sex can be fun, I also learned something else. It isn't worth the emotional pain I've paid, because I'm single, so I've given my heart and something very special to guys that end the end weren't in it for the long haul, or the right reasons, and maybe I wasn't either. While I try to learn from my mistakes and move on and use what I've learned to grow in grace and Christian maturity, I wish I made different choices and saved myself the pain.

As I reading the last post I got to thinking, maybe one way to help the next generation understand is to have people talk about their experiences and how their experiences have helped or hurt them. Get a full spectrum, people that waited till they got married and now have a wonderful marriage, people that didn't wait and had issues (or maybe still do) in their marriage because of it, and people who are still single and either waiting (and what that is like) and not waiting (and how that affects them and their walk with Christ). I think that education is the key. Let kids know what it is like out here in the "big, bad world". Forewarned is forearmed (or something).

If kids/teens/20 somethings know what it is like and what to expect that have what they need to deal with their feelings. It isn't impossible to wait to have sex till you marry, even if you marry after you turn 25 or something.

[Condemned]

Originally Posted by mackinac81

I think the OP has a point. I began going to church at 18, and I was surprised at how many people my own age were engaged, married or talking about marriage by the time they were nineteen or twenty. I'm twenty seven and a little over half my christian friends are married now. Thankfully they're happy in their marriages. I've wondered if lust had something to do with it. I mean, sexual attraction is an element in any relationship. BTW My non christian friends are still enjoying the single (albeit sexually active) life.

Don't get me wrong. Sex should be saved for marriage, and not just for morality's sake either. Sex does take relationships to a whole new level that makes a potential breakup much much harder down the road. If I weren't a christian, I probably still wouldn't want to have sex with my girlfriend for that reason alone.

Some of my friends lucked out, but others were not so lucky at all. In fact, when I started going to the church at 14, I used to wonder why so many of the older (I'm talking mid 30s at the time) married folks used to look so miserable. There were often relatively huge age gaps and quite a few of the couples sat apart from one another. In one of our sister churches here in Brooklyn, it was easy for husband and wives to hide their alienation because men and women sat on opposite sides of the aisle to avoid any funny ideas. Back home in the Caribbean, many of the men were ministers and would sit on the stage so they could hide their spousal alienation too.

[SeekerSA]

To make any qualitative statement, one would need to do a poll on divorcees with more than a simple "did you marry for sex"

There is a difference between love and lust and that I think is a blurred line in the teen years. As a teen, folk are not really ready to raise or care for a family and when babies come at an early age, they are cute and cuddly (lie a kitten) but soon they grow up with a whole different requirement and new challenges.

Having never done it with a girl in the church of my parents, I went outside the church.

For a man the consequences are less severe than the woman and I believe that women are more selective as a general rule.

There are all sorts of studies that show women may seek out studs to get the best genes but may well marry a not so stud guy who is more "caring and nurturing" but all of this is conjecture.

At the end of the day, at 15-25 mean are at their peak and they say the ladies are later (30's or something) but there is the instinct that exists that IMO, abstinence does not address. I got married at 27 and can assure you I was not a virgin. My wife and I lived together for over 2 years before marrying and we are now married 23 years - she was 24 when we married.

I have never been unfaithful to my wife.

With my teens, I have taught abstinence but have also said if you must, use protection - I am a realist. Fathers are more protective of their daughters than their sons - in my case anyway. Unplanned pregnancies are the things that force one into something that most are not ready for.

As the divorce stats for believers and non believers are similar, there is no golden rule IMO.

[MontanaGuy]

Sexual desires can be especially powerful when someone is young and I can understand how a very religious person might believe they're making a good decision to get married so they can be sexually active if they're afraid of the consequences of sinning by committing fornication. That doesn't seem very sensible when you consider all of the factors that are needed to make a marriage successful but I can understand how it could happen.

[songinthewind7]

I can see how you feel as I went through the same thing. I ended up getting married purely for sex. While the sex was fun, nothing else about the marriage was and it was over within a year.
Another poster mentioned something about the emotional pain part of sex and it not being worth it in the long haul. I totally agree.
I'm in my late 40's now and in a long term relationship.
My opinion would be to hold on and wait until you're in a relationship to have sex. Too many diseases going on now and too much crap to deal with. I know it's tough and since you mentioned God, I don't think he cares if you have sex or not before marriage but he gave us common sense or we got it from somewhere, and we should all use it.