How Premarital Sex Wrecks Lives.

If we put societal values and religious convictions aside for a moment, and honestly reflect on how much value we put on love and marriage we may realize that certain practices we have allowed to surround it in the past few decades has caused us to fall short as family units and as a society in general.

By 'fall short' I am referring to higher rates of divorce, crime, mental health issues, death, disease...you name it!

Was it always normal to sleep with someone you thought you were in love with before legalizing your commitment to each other? No.

Kevin Leman wrote in his book 'Pleasers (why women don't have to make everyone happy to be happy)' that premarital sex greatly inhibits emotional intimacy for most couples who later get married.

And according to Gary Chapman in his book, 'Things I wish I had known before we got married' , people do not get married with the intention of getting a divorce and that, divorce is a result of failure to learn to work as a team in an intimate relationship.

So if we marry both opinions the uniting factor surrounds the subject of 'intimacy' which premarital sex inhibits and the very frequently likely result which is 'divorce'.

That said, I will dive into the reasons and points a few of my acquaintances on twitter shared with me upon my asking, regarding the reasons why sex before marriage is a definite deal breaker:

1. Promiscuity as a bad habit and inhibitor in forming strong emotional connections:

It's difficult to value people's feelings when we get into the habit of focusing on what they physically bring to the table. The thing about habits is that because they are repeated so regularly they tend to happen subconsciously.

If it is one's habit to give their bodies away in the attempt to please every new person they really like then the chances of the potential development of a connection outside the physical is inhibited and depreciates with every physical contact. This implies (In my opinion) that, because very little priority has been given to developing an emotional connection that is not tied in anyway to the physical, it becomes almost impossible to ascertain the authenticity of the physical connection which will always contaminate the objective truth of the emotional connection.

2. Sexually Transmitted Diseases:

I know a few people in the past who have insisted on going to health clinics for a full check up and sexual health screening with a new partner just few weeks after they met before considering taking their relationship to the 'next' level physically. Do I think it is going a tad too far? Certainly not. If people pass on cold sores by kissing, one can never be too careful these days.

Growing up, I had a wonderful much older friend (about 12 years older) I lost to AIDS whose fiance killed himself after passing the HIV virus to her. It happened at a time (late 90s) when not much positive publicity was shared concerning the disease and in a very traditional Nigerian society, it was a lot of hell to endure for her. Somehow she survived the stigmatization for roughly five years and gave up following several months of neglecting herself and not taking her medication due to severe depression especially surrounding the general treatment she received from people who should have helped her cope (such as her doctors and her lecturers in university). It's still difficult to get over these turn of events. To this day she is the best friend I ever had and I wish I did not have to learn this hard lesson from what she suffered.

3. Unplanned Babies-

Unplanned pregnancies do not only wreck those that have them but the children who come about them too. And very few scenarios of this premise can boast of developing individuals who grow into fully rounded mentally and emotionally healthy contributors to the societies they find themselves in.

We often hear that "little drops of water make the mighty ocean". Well, in this case the more babies born without serious thought or planning surrounding their conception, the more cases of societal accidents we are likely to nurture.

The more broken families and disturbed scenarios surrounding their existences, the more mental health issues and higher crime rates we are going to have to deal with. Because, broken people break people we should expect that if the primary unit in our societies remains broken our societies will continue to maintain a healthy distance from being fixed.

These are the reasons I believe that pre-marital sex wrecks lives. If you truly love that person, wait; Get to know them and honestly ascertain for yourself if they are someone you could grow a family together with that somehow could help make the world a better place.