WAITING FOR MARRIAGE
This is the story of Micah and I deciding to wait to have sex until marriage (AFTER we didn’t wait) why I’m now a huge proponent for waiting (even if you haven’t waited thus far in life), and the fruit that has grown in our relationship because we chose to recommit to waiting.
WAITING FOR MARRIAGE
…What a crazy thing to say these days, amiright?
I certainly thought so when I was told by my counselor that Micah and I should stop all physical aspects of our relationship until we were married. Mind you, we weren’t even close to being engaged at this point…
The funny thing is, is when we started counseling with Bill, who recommended this, Micah had already told me he wanted to eliminate the physical aspect of our relationship to see if we could build true connection without that.
Let’s take it back…
After Micah and I came back from the Beauty and The Beast National Tour we were unsure if our relationship would stick it out in the “real world”. I often liken the tour environment to that of The Bachelor or the Bachelorette…
You’re removed from the stressors of NYC life, you’re making consistent money, you don’t have your usual living expenses, you are in a new place all the time and able to have fresh exciting experiences daily. It’s simply not real life.
We’ve shared this before, but after we got back to NYC, Micah came to me and said he wanted to see what our relationship could be without the crutch of sex.
Mind you, I had just come out of a relationship that ended because I wasn’t physically what my partner wanted, (I share that story in a post focused on forgiveness here) so my self-image was in the trashcan. This caused me to respond in unfair anger and hurt towards Micah.
Looking back, I have immense respect for Micah for having the courage to say he wanted to do something so unconventional, and something that he probably knew I wouldn’t respond well too.
The thing is, is that my response didn’t come from what he was saying, it came from how I viewed myself. My value rested in whether or not I was desirable to a man, and in that instance, in my mind, I clearly wasn’t wanted which equated to having no value.
I spent months trying to get Micah to cave on the commitment that he’d made just so I could feel better about myself.
Every time I won that battle I could see that we’d swapped positions…my self-image temporarily came out of the trash, and his temporarily went in. Shockingly enough, this didn’t make for a very healthy relationship, ha! We were constantly butting heads and having the same conversations over and over and over and over.
In the midst of that drama, I left to do another national tour. I was excited to have the time to myself to start to hopefully truly heal my heart with no distractions.
I spent a lot of time with God, journaling and reflecting over the couple of months I was out on tour, but I didn’t have the proper tools to heal on my own…
This is why I’m such a big advocate of counseling!! It wasn’t until I had a wise, objective perspective to help me sort through my trauma and apply God’s word to those traumas in a way that I wasn’t studied enough to do on my own, that I experienced breakthrough… but I’m jumping ahead!
Long story short, after I got back to NYC, Micah and I started to explore switching up our paths as far as how we were making money. This led us to some business coaches/mentors, which in turn led us to Bill.
I was so performance/approval driven driven back then, that I only started working with Bill because I wanted to be perceived as a growth-oriented person, not because I necessarily thought I had anything I needed help with. LOL.
I’ve spoken about this before, but Bill took me on a journey of letting go of my past and fully forgiving anyone who’d hurt me, including myself, which allowed me to start moving towards the personal freedom I desired.
I’ve recommended this book before, but this is The Process by Bill Hoffman. It details the process of personal healing he walked us through alongside his counseling.
Enter the purity covenant…
As we continued to work together, Bill started to mention the idea of Micah and I not being physically intimate until we got married.
Funny how this kept coming up for me…
God knows what we need, exactly when we need it, and from what source. Maybe I was too immature to listen to Micah, but since Bill was saying it, I started to become more amenable to the idea.
I grew up in church hearing about how sex is something sacred for marriage, blah blah blah, but no one ever really explained to me WHY.
“That’s what the Bible says” is NOT an answer to why for a young teenaged brain.
My understanding was that sex was not a casual thing, that it was meant for when you were in love…but that incomplete understanding led to me engaging in sex way before I was prepared for the emotional consequences that come when you share that with someone.
Have you heard of the term soul-tie?
It’s something I started learning about when I got into counseling. God intends for us to have healthy relational ties with one another, but there are also harmful, dysfunctional ties that the enemy will use for our destruction. Many of these often come through sex.
Bill explained that society teaches us that sex is single-dimensional, purely physical. But in reality sex creates an emotional and spiritual connection.
He shared with me this quote from Dr. Daniel Amen’s book, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life…
“Whenever a person is sexually involved with another person, neurochemical changes occur in both their brains that encourage limbic, emotional bonding. Limbic bonding is the reason casual sex doesn't really work for most people on a whole mind and body level. Two people may decide to have sex ‘just for the fun of it,’ yet something is occurring on another level that they might not have decided on at all: Sex is enhancing an emotional and spiritual bond between them whether they want it or not.”
Beyond what happens to our souls and spirits when we have sex outside of marriage, he also explained how if we use sex as our main tool to feel close, resolve fights, and build intimacy, we are not really building intimacy at all.
My face probably looked like the *mind blown* emoji as he continued to talk.
Yes, sex is an awesome part of marriage, but if that’s your foundation, how long can that really last?
So begins the process of Micah and I building a healthy foundation of relationship.
We spent 3 years with no physical intimacy, and the foundation we built in those 3 years is one of our greatest personal accomplishments. I believe our relationship is as fruitful as it is now because of the ways our personal shortcomings came to light and the work we put in to grow and create a safe space of communication before we got married.
I love this photo! It’s candid, and my face says it all. He is a safe place for me to not have to wear any masks.
What did eliminating sex do for our intimacy…
1. My personal self-image was transformed.
I had no idea physical relationships were a place from which I was pulling my worth, and it wasn’t until I didn’t have that validation anymore that God was able to reveal to me that I believed my worth was extrinsic. I would have never had the space to dig up those roots and rebuild my foundation on the fact that I’m intrinsically valued as a daughter of God.
2. Micah’s unhealthy patterns were brought into the light.
There was an instance in which I found porn on his phone and boooyyyyy did that lead to some uncomfortable conversations. BUT it allowed for a new layer of communication in which Micah could share with me that he had been turning to porn, which had been eroding his capability to engage in a healthy committed relationship.
[Sidebar…I want Micah to write a whole post about his journey with breaking his porn addiction, because it’s SO powerful and something that doesn’t get talked about enough!]
We were both operating out of fear and insecurity because of various experiences and conditioning, and the elimination of being able to “fix” a disagreement through sex allowed us to grow our communication skills and build the safe place for vulnerability that we wanted our future marriage to be.
3. When sex is off the table you are FORCED to create intimacy in other ways so that your relationship doesn’t feel like any other friendship.
Micah and I leaned into reading the books that Bill recommended, journaling, and allowing those things to spur meaningful conversation between us.
As our relationship became healthier and safer, we were able to share with one another what we were working on individually with Bill, which only further increased our intimacy and connection.
Final Reflections…
Without the elimination of sexual intimacy NONE of the things we needed to work on and uproot would’ve been revealed because we would have been numbing them with sex…
Our connection to our Creator, our understanding of our value/worth, our understanding of what a healthy relationship looks like, our ability to take our thoughts captive, our ability to mature and know that just because we FEEL something doesn’t mean we need to act on it…all of those things were grown because of the commitment we made to the purity covenant.
The idea of abstaining from sexual activity can sound like something that is compartmentalized to one area of life/relationship, but we have seen that the seeds that are planted because of it bloom into fruit across all areas of our hearts and our lives.
As always, please reach out to me if you have more questions about our journey, or if you apply anything I share here and it brings you value. I love you even though we haven’t yet met, and I want to hear about how you’re growing and changing!
I am in your corner!
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WE THINK YOU’LL ENJOY. . .
