The Biggest Lie I Was Told About Sex

When you’re a young, single woman, everyone will try to give you their opinion about relationships. It doesn’t matter if you ask for advice or not. You’ll still receive it, sometimes forcefully, from family members, friends, and even strangers. While their intentions might be good, the advice isn’t always beneficial and it can sometimes be difficult to discern who to listen to. Other times, you can smell bad advice from a mile away.

Before I met my husband, a family member I certainly wouldn’t go to for relationship tips gave me some terrible sex advice. At the time, I knew it was misguided, but after nearly nine years of marriage, I realized how this advice magnified one of the biggest lies we’re told about sex: that good sex is about getting what you want from the other person.

Taking Your Boyfriend for a Test Run

Even though I received this unsolicited advice over 10 years ago, it stuck with me for all the wrong reasons. I can’t remember what prompted the conversation, but I remember she said, “Before you marry someone, make sure you sleep with them first. You need to know that the sex is good.”

This perspective isn’t uncommon in the modern world, and I’m certain I wasn’t the only woman to be given this advice. Many women have been advised to take their boyfriends or fiancés for a test run in the bedroom as if they were buying a car instead of entering into a lifelong commitment.

In this scenario, the other person ends up being an object for you to use and dispose of if they don’t live up to your standards. Sex becomes meaningless since it’s no longer about the love between you and another person; it’s about your own physical pleasure and nothing else.

The idea behind her advice was that if I had sex with the man I planned on marrying then it would help me make sure he was the right person. According to her and many others, it would determine whether we were sexually compatible and a relationship can’t last if you’re not sexually compatible, right? The real question is does testing out sex with your boyfriend actually improve outcomes in a relationship?

Does Having Sex Before Marriage Improve Outcomes?

When we look at the relationship between premarital sex and the length or quality of a marriage, it doesn’t paint a positive picture. Premarital sex in some studies has been linked to higher rates of divorce, and this is especially true when a person has previous sexual partners other than the person they end up marrying. Based on the current research, testing out different sexual partners doesn’t improve the outcomes of your future relationship.

According to one study from the Journal of Family Psychology, not only do couples who wait until marriage have higher relationship satisfaction, but they also report better sexual quality than couples who had sex early on in their relationship.

Our Culture’s Flawed View of Married Sex

Basing whether you want to spend the rest of your life with someone on how they perform in the bedroom implies that sex is not an act of love between two individuals, but instead, a vain performance, designed only to bring you physical pleasure.

Having sex with this mindset leads to you using the other person for your own gain, which isn’t a great start to a long-term relationship if you’re considering marriage. There’s certainly nothing wrong with wanting sex to be enjoyable (don’t we all?), but what I’ve realized in marriage is that the more a person knows you and loves you, the better sex is. 

In the words of sociologist Mark Regnerus, “A good marriage – including the sex – is something that’s built.” The first time you have sex with your significant other isn’t necessarily an indication of compatibility, and when you’re committed to a person, sex gets better with time.

Sex Gets Better with Practice

When you talk about sex and how it’s an opportunity to serve the other person, you’ll often get scoffs from those who buy into hookup culture. They assume that sex with the same person for the rest of your life must be boring. Their idea of the sexual relationship between spouses mirrors the cliche ‘90s sitcom couple where the wife constantly refuses to have sex with her oaf of a husband because he doesn’t meet her emotional needs (or do the dishes).

But the opposite is true for many couples in healthy marriages. While not all married couples have sex frequently, they do have more sex than single people. The flawed idea behind the sex advice I was given is that sex is either good or it isn’t – as if sex couldn’t get better with time.

However, for those who choose to wait until they’re married to have sex, it may not be “good” in the beginning, even if you can appreciate the beautiful meaning behind the act. While hookup culture says sex with the same person will eventually get old, the truth is, as intimacy and vulnerability increase in the bedroom, so does the quality of your sex life.

To Be Fully Known and Loved

Many of the beliefs about sex that are so rampant in our society reduce the act to only one purpose: physical pleasure. Women and men are taught that having multiple sex partners keeps things exciting and that passion is the ultimate priority when finding a suitable mate.

But that couldn’t be further from the truth. There’s nothing more pleasurable than having sex with someone who fully knows and loves you; with someone who is fully committed to you and wants to meet your needs. There couldn’t be anything more intoxicating than physically joining yourself with someone who knows every part of you and has seen every inch of you – and chooses to love you fiercely anyway.

Hookup culture makes sex cheap and meaningless when it’s meant to be so much more. Sex with a stranger might be temporarily satisfying, but sex with the person who knows you more intimately than anyone else is healing, not destructive.

There’s so much pressure for young women to dive into hookup culture and test the waters. There’s pressure to avoid commitment at all costs so you can experience sex with other people. But at the end of the day, meaningless sex will leave you feeling empty.

Closing Thoughts

As someone who has been married for nearly nine years, I can personally attest that once you and your husband start viewing sex as an opportunity to love and serve each other, your sex life will be anything but boring. There’s nothing sexier than sharing intimacy with someone who would willingly give their life for you.

Good sex isn’t about performance or experience. It’s about both spouses serving each other and sharing the most intimate parts of themselves. You don’t have to sleep with the person you plan on marrying to see if you’re compatible. If you’re willing to be vulnerable with your spouse, you’ll get to spend the rest of your life learning how to love one another –  both inside and outside the bedroom.