You have heard it said; there’s nothing morally wrong with two people having consensual sex.
Even if it’s between teenagers.
The postmodern culture defines sexual morality as how you treat yourself and the people you have it with and not so much how long you wait.
Sex is no longer held in high esteem as an activity between two people in a committed relationship. It is thought to be a recreational activity with no significant value but for enjoyment and as a bargaining chip.
Magazines and social media you turn to for answers want to get your attention and make money. They glorify sex and urge you to take part in teenage sex because once you get hooked, you will go to them for more tips or to buy their products
They convince you that there are no scars left from having casual sex with multiple partners. Sex is equated to exercising, yet working out leaves a mark seen in losing weight or having a better cardiac system.
Sex does leave a mark.
Teenage sex leaves even deeper scars that take a lifetime to heal. They include
- Emotional scars
- Physical consequences
- Mental issues
- Relational difficulties
- Spiritual challenges
The Google search results you get about sex will give you benefits that are one-sided and ignores facts and real-life experiences. Let’s challenge these benefits.
Challenging the Supposed Benefits of Teenage Sex
The internet is filled with numerous articles and videos pushing their audience to engage in casual sex.
Movies, series, music, and games play a role in over-sexualizing teenagers through sexually explicit images and language.
No wonder the thought of abstaining from premarital sex to follow God’s plan for sex sounds strange or old-fashioned.
Let’s ask some questions we handle in our training at Parenteen Kenya as we challenge these benefits.
You Assess Your Sexual Compatibility before Committing
Is sex the main and only way to determine if you are right for each other?
How many partners will you have to go through before finding the right one?
Did you need to practice eating before you started eating?
Sex Creates a Stronger Bond
If this were true, why do people who have multiple sex partners hop from one relationship to another?
Why is the divorce rate in individuals who had sex before marriage higher if closeness is measured by sex?
Why do you need a strong sexual bond as a teenager with important life changes waiting for you?
It’s an Opportunity to Have Fun as a Teenager
Is teenage sex the only way to have fun as a teen?
Have you as a teenager matured emotionally, psychologically, and mentally to engage in sex?
Have you weighed this fun with the consequences that follow; guilt, betrayal, shame, rejection, and STDs?
Sex Makes You Popular and Cool
Will the opposite sex respect you outside having sex with them?
Can you view your sexual partners and the people that hang out with you because you are cool as your real friends?
What next after you give yourself to everyone in your neighbourhood and school?
When you critically think about these benefits of premarital sex, they don’t look as rosy as your friends and social media portrays them to be.
What Does Research Say about Sex Before Marriage
Hot news in the magazine world and social media doesn’t wait for facts or look for evidence. Whatever the majority advocates for or whoever pays them the most is what they will sell as truth and urge you to take part in it.
Doing your fact-finding before accepting what social media and your friends pressure you to do will save you serious heartaches.
Plenty of research conducted on abstinence and the importance of sex after marriage outweighs all the fads.
Let’s look at one such data.
Source: IFStudies
The results above show that couples who wait to have sex until marriage report stability in their relationship, better quality of sex, good communication, and more satisfaction than all the rest.
Other reasons why waiting for marriage before having sex increases the probability of enjoying a lasting intimate relationship include:
- God ordained it that way, and he rewards those who follow his design
- The mental, emotional and physiological system matures in adulthood
- The safety of being in a committed relationship
The pressure to give in to teenage sex is at an all-time high, and it is not easy for you as a teen to say no.
The benefits of waiting outweigh the stresses of losing a friend or two who were not your true friends if they reject you because of that.
What are these effects of engaging in teenage sex?
5 Effects to Assess as a Teen Before Having sex
Sex is not only a physical activity that lasts for a few minutes, and you forget about it.
It leaves behind a trail of relational, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual tracks with short-term and long-term effects.
1. Why it’s Harder to Break Up or Get over a Sexual Relationship (Relational Effects)
Let no one lie to you that it is easy to move on from a sexual relationship.
During a sexual encounter, the female’s brain produces a hormone called oxytocin, which stimulates closeness and care for their partner. Oxytocin causes the woman to want to protect the person she has bonded with and leads to increased trust for the individual.
The male’s brain produces a hormone called vasopressin that has the same effects as that of the woman. The man experiences feelings of loyalty and a jealous type of commitment to the woman, and he’s driven to want to guard the closeness they share.
It’s mindblowing how God set this hormonal response to occur in marriage to form a lasting bond.
When the thought of breaking up comes, and you have invested your hormones and emotions into this, it leads to:
- Overcompensating for the loss by having flings hoping it will recreate what you had.
- You stay in a toxic relationship.
- You become enslaved because of the deep feelings you nurtured through sex
- Suicidal ideation and depression.
You must be asking, what happens if you have multiple sexual partners?
Scientifically, any bond that undergoes stress and strain weakens.
When you want to get married and form a bond with your partner, your ability to form a deep bond will have weakened and you will have to work extra hard to get it back.
This fact partly explains why people with a previous history of multiple sexual partners divorce more than their counterparts.
2. Emotional Baggage that Comes with Having Sex before Marriage (Psychological Effects)
The difference between human beings and animals in sexual activity is that God placed in humans a conscious that responds emotionally and leaves a psychological mark.
Your sexually active friend will not tell you the negative thoughts and feelings they experience because they want you to view them like pros. These psychological injuries include:
– Regret: Teens sometimes engage in teenage sex to secure the relationship and hope their partner will stay forever. Most of the time, the opposite happens. Girls who mainly offer sex for closeness feel cheated and used as the partner moves on to the next person.
– Guilt: Your conscience disturbs you because you feel you have committed an offence against yourself, your partner, your parents, or God. The guilt can be a positive experience if it helps you get back on track. Most of the time, it leads to emotional wounds if you do not learn how to forgive yourself and receive forgiveness.
– Despise yourself: When you realize you are only valuable to your boy/girlfriend because you offer sex can cause you to have a low view of yourself. Some activities your partner may ask you to perform may lead you to dislike yourself, especially if you do it to please them.
3. Why Your Thoughts and Attitude Change in a Sexual Relationship (Mental Effects)
As we had seen earlier, society and media overemphasize the benefits of premarital sex and treat it as a consequence-free activity. The data proves otherwise as teenagers in a sexual relationship are more likely to suffer from:
- Depression
- Suicidal ideation
- Cutting
- Eating disorder
- Isolation and loneliness
You cannot separate the mind from the sexual encounters. The thoughts about the experience linger in the subconscious and surface masked as mental health illness.
The prefrontal cortex, a part of your teenage brain that regulates your thinking process, controls your emotions, and assesses risk, isn’t fully developed. Controlling your emotions, judging someone’s intentions, and thinking through a situation is a challenge at this time.
Teen sexual relationships further complicate this process by bringing in unnecessary emotions and thought processes leading to more stress.
In teenagehood, the stress hormone cortisol is produced in high amounts and takes longer to clear in your system. When you stress yourself with the baggage that comes with a sexual relationship, you affect your mental wellbeing and overall health.
4. What are The Visible Outcomes of Premarital Sex? (Physical Effects)
By far, this is the one effect that teens dread the most because of its observable results.
Most teens have been lied to that if they plan to deal with the physical effects beforehand, they can enjoy sex without fearing any consequences.
Even CDC knows the methods advocated are not 100% effective in preventing these outcomes.
“Abstinence from vaginal, anal, and oral intercourse is the only 100% effective way to prevent HIV, other STDs, and pregnancy. The correct and consistent use of male latex condoms can reduce the risk of STD transmission, including HIV infection. However, no protective method is 100% effective, and condom use cannot guarantee absolute protection against any STD or pregnancy.” CDC
So, what are these physical effects?
Pregnancy
Having a baby changes your life entirely, especially as a teenage girl.
Teenage boys are not left behind, and the law follows them to take up responsibility by involving the parents and asking them to pay child support until the teenage boy can do it for himself.
I know what you are thinking, abortion would be the better option.
But wait,
Once a woman becomes pregnant, the famous love hormone oxytocin is released. It starts the process of bonding the expectant mother to their unborn child.
Abortion causes psychological trauma that can last a lifetime because of this natural bond and the feeling that the mother chose to take the life of a harmless baby.
According to WHO, 3 in every 4 abortions in Africa and Latin America are extremely risky, with 7million admissions occurring every year due to abortion complications that can be felt in adulthood.
Abortion is never the best option as it also goes against God’s law of preservation of life.
STDs
Did you know that STDs like herpes and human papillomavirus remain in your body even after treatment?
Oh yes, you have it for life.
Once you get STDs like chlamydia, syphilis, and gonorrhoea and are treated, you are three times more likely to get re-infected than someone who hasn’t.
Let’s not even start with HIV and AIDs, where 51% of all new HIV infections come from the youth between 15 – 24 years.
It is sad to see teenagers struggling with such diseases instead of finding other ways of enjoying their youth outside of sex.
5. Does Sex Before Marriage Affect Your Relationship with God? (Spiritual Effects)
So far, you must have seen a trend that shows how God created our bodies to develop at a specific age and placed hormones to produce a response at the right time of maturity.
The same applies to our digestive system. When you were a baby, your body couldn’t produce the enzymes needed to digest some foods, and your intestines had not matured to handle solid food.
God doesn’t want to prevent you from enjoying sex, but he wants you to wait and have it when all the faculties he placed in you mature. His plan is stated in Mathew 19:4-5:
“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ [ and said, ‘For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh?
Two uniting and becoming one flesh involves sex.
According to God’s standards, sex before marriage is a sin. The bible clearly states that sin separates us from God.
When a person goes against God’s order of things, they encounter challenges like those discussed above, and the relationship with their creator suffers.
Being separated from God means living a life devoid of eternal meaning and seeking after earthly pleasures that will never satisfy.
The good news is that God offers forgiveness through Christ to those who desire to change their ways and wait for the right time to enjoy sex.
You may fall in your walk of reforming but God being loving always gives you another chance to conquer your sin and enjoy a fulfilling relationship with him
To Have Sex or Not to Have Sex as a Teen; the Choice is Yours
Parenteen Kenya has shown you that sex benefits depicted by social media and your friends don’t give you the whole picture of the consequences that follow after engaging in teenage sex.
The visible consequences that most teens fear are a small portion of the other negative outcomes that teenagers go through and carry into adulthood.
There is hope for those undergoing mental, physical, psychological, relational, and spiritual challenges stemming from engaging in teenage sex.
Parenteen Kenya offers you support to face these challenges and find healing. Our services include counselling, life skills training, and spiritual support.
Get in touch with us and enjoy our warm, friendly, and professional services.
Jane Kariuki is a devout Christian, Clinician, Psychologist, and founder of ParenTeen Kenya. She authored an exceptional training manual used in her teens’ workshop and an instructional guidebook for her parenting classes. If she is not training, blogging, or counseling, Jane loves to spend time with her sweet husband and three children.
Pingback: Top 7 Challenges Faced by Teenagers Today in Kenya
Pingback: 4 Valuable Life Lessons for Teens With a Strong Mind