Sex and Marriage

Guilt and more guilt

I was brought up with a model that will be familiar to most readers:

• Don’t have sex. Sex before marriage is bad.
• Don’t touch yourself either, it’s bad.
• You’ve found someone you think you love? Don’t have sex. Sex is only for marriage. Before marriage, sex is bad. Always bad.
• You got engaged? Great. Don’t have sex. Sex before marriage is bad. And don’t touch each other either. That’s bad too.
• You just got married? That’s great. Now have sex. It’s fine now. The bad thing has become good, but for goodness’ sake don’t talk about it, especially in church.
• You’ve had kids? They’re getting older? Great. Tell them not to have sex. Sex before marriage is bad. And they shouldn’t touch themselves either.

All I knew of sex was guilt. As a teenager, experiencing powerful urges we all understand, I would do everything I could to avoid masturbation, but inevitably I’d give into it and then feel the most crushing burden of guilt. I would beg God to forgive me, pleading and pleading until I felt the guilt begin to ebb.

How is a person supposed to have a healthy view of sex if their childhood and early adult associations with it are drenched in guilt? Do you suppose people enter marriage and all that guilt just vanishes? Of course it doesn’t – that isn’t how cognition, association, or human emotions work. By and large, I strongly suspect many Christians are sexually repressed even when married, suffering hangovers of guilt. Sex remains primarily a temptation, especially when two sexually repressed people who are now allowed to have sex somehow end up avoiding it. Now the temptation is external – people you can’t have, rather than the one you can but rarely do.

Christians marry too young

In my opinion, many Christians marry too young, in part because they really want to have sex with their girlfriend/boyfriend and are convinced they’re in love. Maybe they are. It’s hard to say, but there’s one unavoidable fact that can’t be argued with. The prefrontal cortex of the brain is not fully developed until around 25.

The prefrontal cortex is important in a wide variety of executive brain functions, including focusing attention, understanding the consequences of actions, impulse control, managing emotions and planning for the future – all essential for a healthy relationship. Add to this that people change their fundamental approach to life after their first major crisis. In my view, we don’t really ‘know ourselves’ until we understand how we respond to catastrophe, suffering or loss.

At that juncture, we shift our basic stance, incorporating caution and firming up our defensive capabilities. During this process, people can change quite dramatically, and if already married this can put a strain on a young relationship that may no longer be blessed with the compatibility it enjoyed in its youthful naivety. The above combine to make a compelling argument for marrying when 25 or older, when each partner will have a proper grasp of who they are in the world.

What about the Bible?

There is a commonly accepted myth in the church that the Bible offers us a model for sex and marriage. The Old Testament offers no comfort for those looking for a cosy, consistent pattern. Take the story of Jacob and Rachel, which begins in Genesis 29. Jacob falls for Rachel and is determined to marry her, but her father Laban is a cunning, selfish sort, and extracts a promise of 7 years’ labour from Jacob before he can marry Laban’s daughter. Jacob does his time, but on the night of the wedding, Laban sneaks his other daughter, Leah, into the nuptial chamber.

Wedding celebrations back then involved days of feasting and drunkenness, and Jacob, who I can only assume was highly inebriated, had sex with Leah, thinking she was Rachel. On discovering the deception he complains to Laban, but it’s too late. There were no wedding vows and no legal aspect to a marriage – sex formalised the union, and having had sex with Leah, Jacob was now married to her.

Still in love with Rachel, Jacob commits to another 7 years of labour before he finally weds her too, ending up with two wives, each of whom bore him children. I’m sure you can see that this story offers no healthy, Biblical model to base modern Christian marriage upon, so we screw up our eyes to the uncomfortable and zoom forwards in time to the letters of Paul, hoping for something more relatable.

Paul’s instructions on marriage are largely found in his first letter to the Corinthians, in which he says the following. 1 Cor 7:

‘Now about virgins: I have no command from the Lord, but I give a judgment as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy.’

For starters, he is clear the advice he offers is his alone, and not a command from God. We don’t ever emphasise that though, do we? Why not?

‘Because of the present crisis, I think that it is good for a man to remain as he is. Are you pledged to a woman? Do not seek to be released. Are you free from such a commitment? Do not look for a wife. But if you do marry, you have not sinned; and if a virgin marries, she has not sinned. But those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this.’

The Biblical model Paul offers is first and foremost not to marry at all. Unsurprisingly, this is rarely taught in the church either. Paul is seen as an anomaly, when it is convenient to look the other way.

‘I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs – how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world – how he can please his wife – and his interests are divided.’

These are the comments of a man who knows nothing about being in a relationship, and the great honour and beauty it can bring. The Lord rejoices with us in our love, which honours him as any act of love honours him. Remember, this is just Paul’s advice.

‘If anyone is worried that he might not be acting honourably towards the virgin he is engaged to, and if his passions are too strong and he feels he ought to marry, he should do as he wants. He is not sinning. They should get married.’

To put it bluntly, Paul seems to be saying that if your wife-to-be makes you distractingly aroused, you should get married.

‘But the man who has settled the matter in his own mind, who is under no compulsion but has control over his own will, and who has made up his mind not to marry the virgin – this man also does the right thing. So then, he who marries the virgin does right, but he who does not marry her does better.’

Honestly, by this stage I think Paul should have known he was straying beyond his knowledge. He even finishes defensively.

‘A woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes, but he must belong to the Lord. In my judgment, she is happier if she stays as she is – and I think that I too have the Spirit of God.’

If we are to take the actual words of this passage seriously, we must acknowledge this as advice, rather than instruction from the Lord, and I think we also have to accept from Paul’s closing comment that other spiritual people thought differently.

Even if we wanted to accept this as a model, it presents considerable difficulties. In the Hebrew culture of the time it was normal for marriages to be arranged, and for brides to be very young (13 or even younger), hence the references to virgins. Young girls were married to older men – another model we simply cannot accept.

The Church’s model is fabricated

The truth of the matter is that the Bible presents us with many versions of relationships and marriage, and there is no pinnacle to aim for – no clear, final model to aspire to. Importantly, the modern, Christian version of marriage bears little relation to anything we see in either the Old or New Testament.

In Biblical times, there was no spiritual authority figure blessing a marriage, and there was no religious service – just an agreement, a party, and sex to seal the deal. There was no legal aspect to marriage, and no involvement of any kind of state authority. Neither were there any vows. In Matthew 5: 34-37, Jesus said of vows:

‘But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. All you need to say is simply “Yes,” or “No”; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.

James doubled up on this, in James 5:12,

‘Above all, my brothers and sisters, do not swear – not by heaven or by earth or by anything else. All you need to say is a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Otherwise you will be condemned.’

Why do we have wedding vows when they are contradictory to clear Biblical teaching? Why do we pretend that modern ‘Christian’ marriage has anything to do with the Bible?

Love is the answer

For me, the church has made an awful mess of marriage, teaching on marriage, and on sex. We’ve fabricated and enforced a model that has little to do with anything we can see in the Bible, which might be okay if we were honest about it, but we’re not. We tell people our model is fundamentally Christian, writing off anyone who takes a different view.

For me, the solution is obvious. Instead of harping on about structures of our own invention, we should focus entirely on love – the mutual service of two people who are committed to each other. Common Law marriage, where people live and have sex together in an enduring relationship, is surely marriage in God’s eyes. It is in fact much closer to the simple commitment we see throughout Biblical cultures, including in New Testament marriage.

I am not legally married to my partner, but I believe we are married in God’s sight. We were meant to marry two years ago, but Covid had us postpone the wedding twice, and we remain merely engaged. We live together because we’re committed to each other. I raise her son alongside her, eat with her, have sex with her, and love her with all my heart. This summer we will finally have our ceremony, but I don’t believe it will make any difference in God’s eyes – it certainly won’t in ours, or in the eyes of those who know us and love us (with a few exceptions, who sensibly keep their opinions to themselves).

I’ve lived with sexual guilt all my life, thanks to the tone of the conversation around sex in my church upbringing, but through being with my partner, I’ve finally healed. I understand sex for the very first time. It is all about connection. My darling and I were recently in Jamaica on a pre-wedding honeymoon (thanks, Covid!). It was the most romantic week of my life, during which I discovered the intimacy, adoration and oneness of sex in a whole new dimension. The physical act flowed from our emotional and spiritual oneness. There was no guilt, only joy, and such wonderful closeness. Sex with the woman I love healed me of sexual guilt.

It took decades for me to gain a healthy view of sex, and almost as long to accept my own journey, which didn’t follow the tramlines laid out for me in my youth. But I can tell you this – God has been with me every step of the way, teaching me surrender, trust and love. Without him I would never have found my darling, and never have had the courage to bring down the walls of isolation and fear that had kept me single till the age of 40. If I’d insisted we wait till marriage to have sex, I wouldn’t have had a relationship at all. I’d still be on my own, isolated, going nowhere, living a life empty of meaningful connection. Instead, I have a family, a boy to raise, a darling to love, and a future I am excited about.

Let’s not burden young people with sexual guilt. Let’s teach them instead that sex is good and sex is love, when you’re with someone you are committed to. Restraint is good, but it isn’t everything. We don’t need to encourage young virgins to marry, or impose models that exclude everyone whose life journey has taken a more convoluted path. We don’t need to judge people on whether they underwent a ceremony that isn’t even in the Bible, or swore unbiblical vows, or gained a legal certificate from the state.

In the end, love is everything.

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