From a previous post Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, ‘To My Friends’:
Please, never say: “Who does it hurt? Why not a little freedom? I can transgress now and repent later.” Please don’t be so foolish and so cruel. You cannot, with impunity “crucify Christ afresh.”8 “Flee fornication,,”9 Paul cries, and flee “anything like unto it.’ 10 The Doctrine and Covenants adds. Why? Well, for one reason because of the incalculable suffering in both body and spirit endured by the Savior of the world so that we could flee.11 We owe Him something for that. Indeed we owe Him everything for that. “Ye are not your own,” Paul says. “Ye [have been] bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.”12 In sexual transgression the soul is at stake—the body and the spirit. ….continuing….
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 bone 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 Smith 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 symbols and the physical intimacy of your counterfeit union but then fleeing, retreating, severing all such other aspects of what was meant to be a total obligation?
In matters of intimacy, you must wait! You must wait until you can 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 from heaven, you run the risk of 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 recover 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. Thirdly. . . ~Jeffrey R. Holland, To My Friends (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2014) 127-129 (Dwarsligger edition) . . . .continued: The Wrong Side IV
