The Real Reason to Wait Until Marriage

Mr Holdsworth explains why he believes in pre-marital chastity.

I would say, the reason to save sex for marriage is similar to the reason that we have locks on our car doors or the front doors of our homes.

The reason we have locks on our doors is because we can’t trust strangers to respect our dignity and the effects of our hard work. Now, don’t jump ahead, I’m not saying that sex is a property or a commodity. I haven’t gone that far with the analogy. It’s merely that you can’t trust strangers to respect and protect your well-being. And that’s not because all strangers are untrustworthy, but it is because enough strangers are, that you need to protect yourself and your privacy because they will attempt to use that access and that knowledge that serve their interests, often at the expense of your interests. So, you defend yourself against that kind of risk by locking your doors and governing who has that kind of intimate access to you and your home. Not everyone is welcome to enter your house. Only those who have earned a measure of trust are welcome inside. Think about why we wear and have always worn clothing. We often assume that there is a natural utility as the reason, like to protect ourselves from the elements. But in truth, as far back as we have records for, we have examples of people wearing clothing for reasons that have nothing to do with protecting themselves from the elements. There was always some form of decorum or ornamentation as a feature in human clothing. On the question of decorum, an obvious motivation is: privacy. We aren’t just protecting ourselves from the cold, but from exposure to other people. When we wear clothes, we are protecting ourselves from the crude and possibly even vulgar assessments of people who have not demonstrated to us that they can be trusted to protect that intimate knowledge the way we protect it ourselves. In other words, they haven’t proven that they love us. Because that’s what love is: it’s a willingness to do for a person as they would do for themselves. To love someone is, in part, to protect their interests to the same degree that they would protect their own interests.

When a person only has a superficial knowledge of us, they do not know us intimately and therefore, they do not care for us as much as intimacy requires. And from that, a principle should announce itself to us which is that we should only give intimate knowledge of ourselves and our privacy, including our physical form, to those who have demonstrated a deep concern for our wellbeing and who will care for that knowledge the way we do ourselves.