David’s hot. I love running into him at the pool and thinking “that guy’s gonna be mine.” I also get an urge to cover him up. I’m the jealous kind. The point is, I find him sexy. He turns me on. And I know I turn him on. We’re a couple of red-blooded males with a healthy sex drive and a passion for each other. In the words of the great 20th century balladeers Salt-N-Pepa, we “wanna shoop.”

We haven’t. As I mentioned in last week’s post, we’ve chosen to save sex for marriage. Not because we think ourselves purer-than-thou, and not because we think sex is dirty or bad. We don’t care for legalism. I suspect God is less obsessed with people’s sex lives than their neighbors are. We’re waiting because we believe sex plays an important part in establishing a bond of kinship between two people, and we believe that bond is sealed with the covenant of marriage.

I think sex is a form of communication. We use it to say things like "I love you” and "you're hot." Sometimes it’s to say "I'm sorry," or even "I'm lonely." Sexual abusers use it to say "I have power over you." There's many things—good and bad—that we can express through sex. One of those things is "I am yours and you are mine." In other words, we can use sex to physically express the promise of the marriage covenant.

Marriage creates a sacred bond between the spouses. This is the "one flesh" bond captured by the phrase Adam uses when he meets Eve: "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh." Laban uses this metaphorical expression of kinship when he greets Jacob. The Israelites use it upon crowning David. Your kin are those to whom you belong and who belong to you.

You attain kinship through birth, upbringing, or marriage. Your father is your kin by birth; the daughter you adopt and raise is your kin by upbringing; your spouse is your kin by marriage. From Christ's teachings about divorce in Matthew 19:1-9 we learn that the bond of marriage is meant to be even stronger than the bonds of birth and upbringing—a man will leave his parents for his spouse, but Jesus set strict parameters for leaving a spouse.

Adam had no kin prior to Eve, and God observed that this was “not good.” My broken relationship with my parents helps me empathize with Adam's loneliness in the Garden. For years I’ve longed to have kin again. In David I’ve found the “suitable helper" Eve was for Adam, and I look forward to creating that “one-flesh” bond with him. I look forward to saying "I am yours and you are mine."

I can think of many ways to tell David that I love him. I can think of many ways to tell him I find him attractive. I can think of many ways to say "I'm sorry" when I need to. But I cannot think of any way other than sex in which to physically express the promise of marriage. And that promise is so important to me that although I’m not a virgin, I don’t want to use sex now to say anything else.