Continuing from Jeffrey R. Holland The Wrong Side II. . .
Secondly, may I stress that human intimacy is reserved for a married couple because it is the ultimate symbol of total union, a totality and a union ordained and defined by God. From the Garden of Eden onward, marriage was intended to mean the complete merger of a man and a woman—their hearts, hopes, lives, love, family, future, everything. Adam said of Eve that she was bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh, and that they were to be “one flesh” in their life together.13 This is a union of such completeness that we use the word seal to convey its eternal promise. The Prophet Joseph once said we could perhaps render such a sacred bond as being “welded”14 one to another.
But such a total union, such an unyielding commitment between a man and a woman, can only come with the proximity and permanence afforded in a marriage covenant, with solemn promises and the pledge of all they possess—their very hearts and minds, all their days and all their dreams.
Can you see the moral schism that comes from pretending you are one, pretending you have made solemn promises before God, sharing the physical intimacy of your counterfeit union then fleeing, retreating, severing all such aspects or what was meant to be a total obligation?
In matters of human intimacy, you must wait! You must wait until you can give everything, and you cannot give everything until you are legally and lawfully married. To give illicitly that which is not yours to give (remember, “you are not your own”) and to give only a part of that which cannot be followed with the gift of your whole self is emotional Russian roulette. If you persist in pursuing physical satisfaction without sanction of heaven, you run the terrible risk of such spiritual, psychic damage that you may undermine both your longing for physical intimacy and your ability to give wholehearted devotion to a later, truer love. You may come to that truer moment of ordained love, of real union, only to discover to your horror that what you should have saved, you have spent, and that only God’s grace can the piecemeal dissipation of the virtue you so casually gave away. On your wedding day the very best gift you can give your eternal companion is your very best self—clean and pure and worthy of such purity in return. ~ Jeffrey R. Holland, To My Friends (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2014) 127-129 (Dwarsligger edition) For the first of these three posts, click. . . .
