Now, there are certain systems in our brain that move us towards mating like most animals , and there are additional systems in our brains that wire us to connect with one person, together, for life unlike most animals.
The data demonstrates this in multiple ways. More happens during sex than just a momentary experience of pleasure. When we are intimate, chemicals are released in our brains that bond us together.
Vasopressin is primarily released in male brains and oxytocin primarily in females. However, when we bond then break, bond then break, we damage our capacity to bond strongly to the next person1. The first time you apply it to a surface, it bonds strongly. These effects are lessened but still consistent in those who became sexually active later in dating but prior to marriage.
Likewise, sex while dating can sometimes be thought of as an important way to test if a couple are compatible and whether the relationship can stand the test of time, another assumption that appears disproven by the data.
Women, whose wombs are a scarce resource, seek quality. Women are naturally choosy, preferring mates with good genes and abundant resources. They are coy, reluctant to have sex except in the context of a committed relationship. Before mating, women instinctively seek commitment and parental investment from their mates.
Women look to the future, focusing on affection and attachment. That depends heavily on the sexual history and propensities of their mates. Men focus on physical fidelity and look to the present and the past. In particular, they instinctively prefer to marry virgins. This instinctive male preference for virgins is the basis for the old sexual double standard, which regards a woman—but not a man—as dishonored by fornication. The double standard offends modern sensibilities, and Christian sensibilities as well.
Contraception, moreover, seems to rob the double standard of its rationale, since it allows women to have promiscuous sex without much risk of pregnancy.
Similarly, DNA tests can ensure paternity certainty better than the old male strategies of virgin preference and sexual jealousy ever could. They are very subtle after their fashion but absurdly out of date. And so the double standard remains. In light of the double standard, the reasons why men and women should be chaste are different.
Women should be chaste primarily from prudence. Men should be chaste primarily for the sake of justice. For a woman, to have premarital sex is, first of all, to risk pregnancy as an unwed mother, with great costs and risks to herself and her child.
Feminine instincts and bonding hormones can make a woman feel deeply—and perhaps unexpectedly—attached to her sexual partner and her unintended progeny. If her partner leaves her, she may suffer emotionally. If he is a poor mate for the long run, she may still find it hard to leave him.
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But the bonding chemicals prove that we actually are created for monogamy ; the problem is that we have rewired our brains by using sex outside the commitment of marriage. I say all this because this is part of my story. I started having sex in high school. By college, sex had become a sport for me, and I eventually became a sex addict. Then I came to know Christ, and got married.
At my wedding, I literally prayed and thanked God that I had escaped the consequences: specifically, that I did not have an STD, or a child born out of wedlock, or a psycho ex-girlfriend waiting outside to kill me. I thought I had gotten away with it. Year 1 of our marriage: honeymoon. Year 2: disaster.
I know you may find this hard to believe, but I would have gladly chosen the consequences of having an STD or a child out of wedlock, over being imprisoned to a struggle with a woman that I had no idea how to love. But it was hard, and I want to spare you that.
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