God intended for the fruit of sex to be opened between two marriage partners.
God being of love, would also participate in this event and the children which are born from this activity.
Many young people do not know the devastation from becoming sexually involved too soon has on their mind, spirit and developmental growth.
Therefore, we have listed six effects having sex outside of a secure relationship has on a person. We continue from our discussion yesterday: Sex Before Marriage Disrupts Growth of Heart and Character
3. Guilt, Regret and Diminished Sense of Worth
In Genesis, Adam and Eve experienced shame after they ate of the fruit which produced the Fall.
Since sexuality is linked to the conscience, it is no surprise that misdirected love commonly yields a harvest of guilt and loss of self-respect.
When people have used the most valuable part of their bodies to gain pleasure or love or security, they cannot but feel degraded, even if they are not conscious of the loss for some time.
Many experienced teenagers say they regret losing their virginity the way they did.
Both old and young men say that they are haunted with guilt that what was just a pleasurable ride for them was a moving expression of love and commitment for their partner.
Females are more sensitive to how something sacred has been violated with premature sex.
They may feel shame for violating the more of their parent’s or their faith community.
Abortions add weight to the partner’s distress. Infidelity within marriage creates its own guilt-ridden hell for the cheater.
Once the cheater wakes up to the devastation they have caused to the lives of their loved one, the self-reproach can be crushing.
One counselor compares this guilt to having killed someone while driving.
Self-forgiveness can be a formidable challenge.
When one looks at sexual attractiveness and prowess as the important reason to have a romantic connection with another, this makes one judge people based on looks and not on who they are. This behavior creates anxiety in their relationships.
When one is concerned on how they can use another just for sex and not the whole person as a criteria for a relationship, this causes one to have fear that there are more attractive people or those who can perform better.
“Do I still look good enough, perform well enough, please you enough?”
This is tragic when adultery brings this insecurity to the one place that should be safe and secure, the marriage bed.
This undermines the ideal that your partner is unique and irreplaceable.
Jennifer, 30, explains her experience: “The acceptance, even encouragement of premarital sex makes it very difficult to sustain the fantasy that we are the sole
object of love.”
Victims of infidelity often feel they have been trashed.
With this lowered self-esteem, one may enter into other sexual involvements just to prove that they are still desirable.
This leads to even more self-disrespect.
Thus, a vicious cycle of reaching approval through sex, not able to attain this, and thereby compounding one’s desperate need.
4. Heartbreak and Destructive Behavior
All infatuations or romantic involvements of some duration are painful when they break up.
But the break up of emotional ties and expectations of where the relationship was going is intensified even more when sex is introduced.
Studies have highlighted the role of certain brain chemicals in sexual bonding.
Even in casual liaisons, sex acts like a powerful glue which has no easy way to release its grip.
Hearts that bond through sex are unlikely to disengage without being ripped apart in some way.
This trauma, for some, can resemble the pain of divorce.
Others are able to numb or deny the pain through alcohol or pills.
Many men have said that they are so afraid of being hurt like that again that they withhold their hearts even though they give their body to another for moments of pleasure.
This is why young people are indifferent to sexual activity which one commentator called, “oddly disengaged—emotionally cool while physically hot.”
The heartbreak that is incurred and the sense that one has given themselves completely and only received a little in return, not including the fallout of diseases and unwanted pregnancies, can cause young people who engage in sex prematurely to live in despair.
The rate of teen suicide has tripled in the past 30 years in the U.S. This is ths same time period where teenage sexual activity rose sharply.
Statistics show that girls who lose their virginity are more prone to commit suicide than virgins. Male peers are more likely to be involved in destructive behavior, such as running away from home, drug use and getting arrested.
The emotional explosion that comes when one is sexually betrayed can lead to extreme rage or lead to violence against former or new lovers.
Other emotions can be exhibited from the break-up of a sexual liaisons: stalking, assualt and homicide when jealous lovers become a daily even. Countless people live in fear of retaliation by an ex-lover.
5. Spiritual Disorientation
Uncommitted sex encourages a distorted spiritual outlook.
Whether one belongs to a certain religion, one may still have a negative outlook. First, premature sex gives one the belief in one’s own supremacy of his or her ego.
When one has multiple sex partners, it implies that the ego is the ultimate reality. One may believe that others are just ‘accessories’ to use and do not deserve commitment just come and go.
When one gets involved in a sexual bond while at the same time remain aloof from any emotional ties reflects an attempt to split body and soul. They choose to ‘have sex’ rather than to be with a whole-person union with another.
This buys into the fiction that one who lives in this way may believe that they are free to express oneself through the body and independent.
This kind of reality is unspiritual and denies the connectedness of spirit and flesh and also of oneself.
This view of reality causes one to be pessimistic about the possibility of being faithful. It also gives the viewpoint of the unreliability of the universe.
Hebrew prophets pointed out that God was absolutely faithful through His covenant and commitment to His children.
Since, humans are made in God’s likeness, the we should and could be faithful to one another in a lasting relationship.
This is the reason adultery is tied to idolatry - betraying the covenant God and ‘having an affair’ with another god. Jeremiah 3.6, Hosea 1.2
Moving from partner to partner displays a fickleness that is a far cry from the steadfast divine love and the dependability of the created world.
When one treats the mystery of sexuality as just a plaything is irreverent in the extreme.
Religious people use dishonesty to reconcile their own unprincipled sexual behavior with their religious doctrines and perceptions of God.
This only intensifies the disorientation and damage to the spirit.
6. Degradation of Love, Life and Lineage
If one cannot respect the power of sex which allows humans to take on a divine creativity, then they will view few things as sacred.
When sex is cheapened, it tends to lead to a tainted view of its extensions such as love, life and lineage.
These traditional components seem optional and are disregarded when inconvenient.
Love has been degraded so in the dating scene that love is hardly mentioned when discussing sex.
This represents an anemic definition of love where fickle feelings are the focus.
Even in today’s society, a child conceived outside of marriage is still viewed as a curse rather than a blessing.
This is evidence that life and lineage is cheapened through nonmarital sex.
Now unwanted pregnancies is seen as an inconvenience to be taken care of with an afternoon abortion appointment like it was a dentist appointment.
When love is trivialized then life and lineage is tied in with disrespect for the gravity of sexual relations further reinforcing a person’s disorientation of spiritually. Not taking sex seriously, removes one from the Heart of God.
Carson Daly stated that this lowers one’s self-esteem and the feeling that one has been used. One feels self-contempt for being an user.
Then there is the embarrassment being sexually active outside of marriage can place one out of the circle of people who exhibit true integrity.
The uneasiness that comes from concealing one’s activities from family members and others.
Also, Daly speaks about the extreme difficulty of trying to break the vicious cycle of compulsive sexual behavior, and the self-hatred that comes after each sexual bond is broken. Then the cycle begins all over again when one has to seduce another in order to revive one’s fading self-image.
Harvest of Selfishness
Though selfishness has an intuitive link to conflict and evil, it is the selfish abuse of sexuality that gives it its most virulent power.
Egoism and being absorbed into oneself is the very definition of immaturity.
When an individual grows up and builds character, then these selfish traits tend to fade. The big question is why do so many people fail to fully grow up to the full human potential?
Why do some grow to such maturity while other have shallow hearts and small minds and are enslaved to bad habits showing immature behavior close to an animal.
Adam and Eve’s abuse of sexual love is the most critical cause of the original disruption of human growth in morals.
People throughout the ages believe that there is evil and self-destructiveness within every human heart.
This flaw pulls human godly nature down, making it impossible for one to grow fully into their God-like maturity impossible.
Anthropologist Richard Heinberg has observed: “People of every culture and age have insisted that . . . human nature is not natural at all because it has been distorted by some fundamental mistake or failure that has been perpetuated from generation to
generation.”
Reverend Moon defines this fundamental problem as descent from a poisoned lineage, a family tree rooted in self-centered love that bears only fruit of self-centered love.
The forbidden fruit was a metaphor for sexual love, which was ‘picked’ when it was immature and unripe. This fruit was toxic in flesh and within the seed.
The first ancestors’ unprincipled liaison fundamentally disrupted the matrix of family life.
“Humanity lost the standard of true parents, spouses, siblings and children,” explains Reverend Moon.
Opening the sexual fruit in its immature state which all humanity inherited hinders the capacity for us to give the truest love and blindness to the true reality of the heart and spirit. Also, it gave rise to the extreme difficulty of the mind to lead the fallen body.
Catholics call this tendency original sin. Buddhism attributes this enslavement to the senses. Judaism calls it an evil inclination.
Freud deemed it the sexual instinct - the most unruly side of the root of the unconscious.
This inheritance, revolving around the heart and sexual desire, derailed moral and spiritual development.
Return for Tomorrow’s Post: Relationships Need True Love to Work
This post was rewritten and derived from the religious book, “Educating for True Love” written by a team of writers to explain Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s philosophy on love and marriage.
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