Sex is About Love, Not Marriage

I know this is an age-old topic, but a recent argument with a friend has made the particular topic of the relationships between sex, love, and marriage relevant for me in the last couple of days. My friend’s position is that sex is an act for a male and a female who have been united in the eyes of the church via marriage, while mine is that sex is between two people that love each other, regardless of whether they are married or not¹. No matter how my friend spun her opinion, I just could not understand where she was coming from and how her views made sense to her in this day and age.

I do understand my friend’s perspective in terms of the fact that she does not wish to lose her virginity until she is married. That is her choice, I respect that and would never agree to anyone trying to pressure her into doing something she doesn’t feel that she is ready to do until she is married. I am, however, trying to understand how sex, to her, is more about marriage than it is love. She feels that it is only okay to have sex if you are married, and that love goes hand in hand with marriage, and therefore marriage is more important than love when it comes to sex.

I think my friend’s logic makes no sense, personally. I believe that you love more than one person throughout a lifetime but (ideally) will marry only once, so my friend interchanging the terms “marriage” and “love” as if they were synonyms doesn’t make any sense to me. You don’t have to marry someone to love them, and you might not necessarily love the person you marry. That’s an awful thing to say, but it’s true as not every single married person in the world loves their spouse, which creates a loophole in my friend’s logic. It’s also true that not every couple that loves each other and want to spend the rest of their lives together get married. So how does sex fit into those situations if, as my friend feels, sex is about marriage, and not love?²

The way I see it, sex is something done between two people that love each other. Marriage has nothing to do with it. Sex is about love and the relationship between the two, not whether or not they are a union in the eyes of God. Now, some people might say sex has nothing to do with love or marriage and only physical pleasure, but that’s a whole different topic…

1. That is not to say I think sex is okay if the two having sex are married to other people – cheating is never something I would approve of! [↩]
2. I’m only talking about premarital and marital sex here, not extramarital sex. [↩]

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.