by Jen Leech

Created on: July 11, 2009

Would you buy a pair of pants without trying them on? Would you pick a restaurant without knowing what the food is like? Marriage is forever, so if you are going to commit to forever, you need to be able to confidently say that you will be happy with your partner. Your marriage will be very negatively effected if your incompatible with your partner sexually. This is not to say that you should give it out to anyone. Sex is something that is special and should be respected. Intimacy is a process that grows and moves forward as two people become closer emotionally and physically.

These two people have a lot of things to learn about each other. They will learn what the other likes on their pizza, in their stocking on Christmas morning, and what the other one sounds like in the middle of the night when stricken with the flu. If these two people are going to stay together, in a happy marriage, for the rest of their lives, they need to know before the nuptials that they can live together. They need to be able to confidently say that they can fall asleep next to this person every night for the rest of their lives. That they will look past their annoying flaws that one can really only know when living with someone.

I don't understand how someone could get married without living together at some point before getting married. I would prefer to fall in love, move in, pass some milestones together, fall deeper in love, fight, make up, have an anniversary or two or three or twenty or whatever makes sense to the two of you. Then when a formal ceremony feels right, go ahead with it.

A wedding should be about the marriage and the relationship. It's not about taking a step that you have been told is next, though you are in a wide open space with many different ways you can go and things you can see. Just because you have been told that after you date and fall in love, you get married, move in together, have sex and make babies doesn't mean that that is they way that it is supposed to be. You can't say that a couple who have been together, committed and madly in love are not a real family when a couple who have been married for five years and are both cheating on each other are. The part about this that matters is the love and the commitment, not the order in which things are done.

The relationship is best protected when the couple know each other very very well. Though sex is something that should be respected and enjoyed within the boundaries of a committed serious relationship, it is something that a couple should do, along with living together and communicating and growing together, to ensure that they are fully prepared for the marriage that they are signing up for.

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