Tying the knot, gettin’ hitched, doing the hanky panky, the horizontal tango, sex and marriage. The concept of marriage has been becoming more prevalent in my life as I approach that age where it seems like everyone is getting married or engaged. And nobody warned me about what this time in my life would be like at a Christian college.

I knew that after graduation, a lot of my friends would be finding “the one” and settling down, but boy was I not expecting how commonplace marriage would be at a small Christian University. Let me lay it down for you: boy meets girl, they fall in love, and six months later they’re getting married at 20. Now, for some people, that is peachy dandy and genuinely wonderful. But I’m going to be 20 next year, and I can’t imagine myself getting married for a long while.

But, something that has been troubling my thoughts lately is the question of “what even is marriage?”

So, what is it?

Today, marriage is one of the most symbolic and meaningful ceremonies that can be performed in our society. It’s a government level declaration of two people’s love for one another. Beautiful, right? But if you grew up in a Christian community like me, it has basically become “I love you, now we can bone.” Which isn’t as beautiful. Marriage has become corrupted in a lot of religious cultures almost becoming “permission” to have sex. I don’t believe that is what God intended sex to be. I believe, actually, that God intended sex as the marriage of two people. Chemically, some wild stuff happens when we have sex with someone we care about.

Oxytocin has been dubbed the “love hormone” because it does simply that. It creates bonds, trust, and generosity in us. And guess what? A whole lotta that stuff is released when we have sex. I don’t think that is any kind of coincidence. Having sex is meant to give us a long lasting bond unlike any other kind we’ve ever had. Sound familiar? Kinda sounds like what marriage is supposed to be.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate marriage and I don’t think that people shouldn’t get married. But, the way that our society is starting to completely separate sex from emotion is concerning. A quote from the book Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins summarizes it well by saying that, “to approach sex carelessly, shallowly, with detachment and without warmth is to dine night after night in erotic greasy spoons. In time, one's palate will become insensitive, one will suffer (without knowing it) emotional malnutrition…”

We should stop viewing sex as the juvenile act of rebellious teens or as the only way to properly fulfill a marriage. It’s so much more than that, even from a non-religious standpoint. Science tells us that sex is important to our brains and emotions, and I think we should stop brushing it under the rug and start talking about it.

TL;DR I believe marriage the way we view it today isn’t real, and that sex is the true binding of two people.