Casual Sex and Moral Boundaries
This year will be my twelfth year in marriage. A few months after we were married my pastor’s wife remarked that she was really pleased at the fact that many young people she had counseled came into matrimony as virgins. I knew she was making this remark in reference to a similar question she asked my then fiancé and I at counselling before we were married. She went further to encourage young people in the congregation to continue to be chaste. That was twelve years ago – I am not sure this woman pastor can say the same of young people today. The manner sex is casualized today is distressing. One wonders if we can ever recover healthy moral boundaries ever again.
As I type this, I am seated in KFC, Ilorin. My young cousin, Omotayo Yusuff, brought me here for lunch. As I eat, all around me are young people – not older than 21. Boys and girls, laughing and chatting away over bowls of chicken, chips and ice cream. There is not one older person here except me. Where do they get money to buy these things? When a boy has spent all these on you, young lady, you think he will let you go without laying you first?
I go to Nairaland to catch up with news but these days Seun Osewa and his moderators prefer to put on front page stories around young people and their sex lives. Young unmarried person’s sharing sordid stories centered around sex outside marriage. Yesterday it was a young boy asking people to advise him whether to continue in a relationship. The girl he was seeing, and also sleeping with, told him something of her sex history. Now the girl disgusts him. He learnt she had had four abortions for one guy despite the fact that she comes from a very wealthy home. One I read about in a book said she had slept with no less than a hundred men and she was not yet 30. All sorts of sordid stories and one just wonders.
When the Christian religion counsels on chastity, it does so because it recognizes that sex is sacred and must not be trivialized. If not, all the parties involved will end up in deep pain. Sex is the means of procreating. There is no point engaging in the act if the parties involved are not ready to handle what will result from it – which is usually children. When Christians fight abortion we do it in reaction to a sexual revolution that has enveloped society with the result being unwanted children. Why have sex when you cannot care for the child that result from it?
Second. Sex is a means of renewing one’s marriage covenant. The natural tendency in marriage is conflict and separation. God put sex in between the couple to renew their love for one another. That is why they call it love-making. When you take sacred acts like that and cheapen it; carrying it out with every thing in skirt or trouser, such a person cannot live life normal. And the dangerous thing about sex is that the minute a person eats the forbidden fruit, you have lost your innocence and cannot reverse it. You may manage your urge but you will always have an appetite that only the act can satisfy.
Society is broken because humanity thinks that they can live in God’s world while at the same time despising God’s laws. The God who said you should not fornicate is all knowing and obedience is a world of wisdom. Before I was married someone told me that the same energy you put into sex, is the same energy you expend on creativity, study and learning. If young people will spend their youth learning, when they enter marriage they will be able to better channel their creativity. God’s law is one man, one wife. God’s law is no sex outside the boundaries of marriage. Marriage is difficult enough; you do not want to add to the mix the confusion of sex. I believe that a couple that enter marriage chaste, are more likely to be faithful to each other than those who go to their matrimonial homes having known other people sexually.
We gain nothing by imbibing a Western culture on sex without imbibing their intellectualism. Despite the sex revolution in the West, they still have a society that is built in an orderly and productive way. If our young people will learn the sexual revolution of the West but despise her productivity, the Nigeria they will live in will be a thoroughly hopeless one.
© Deji Yesufu.
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