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[Newbie]

My son and his girlfriend have told my that they want to move in together and live with each other. I don't think it's a great idea, and I don't think it's right, but I don't quite know what to tell them. What does the Bible say about it, and what can I say to them?

[jimwalton]

Well, I hate to assume, but I would think it’s a safe guess that the main reason two people want to move in together is so they can have sex together in a safe (don’t have to worry about getting caught), “regular” (hey, it’s our own place), mutual environment.

If the issue is sex outside of marriage, the Bible has so much to say about it I can’t possibly write it all. A few good examples for starters might be:

Hebrews 13.4 “Marriage should be honored by everyone, and the marriage bed should be kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.” Not very much nuance there, and fairly easy to understand.

1 Thes. 4.3-5: “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality, that each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like unbelievers who don’t know God.”

Well, you get the idea. If the point is to be able to have sex when they want to without fear, judgment, or guilt, then the Bible would say, “Don’t do it.” After all, being a Christian isn’t doing what our culture says is just fine, but doing what God says is just fine, and in this case these are two very different solutions.

But people usually also want to know what’s wrong with it, since no one gets hurt by it. Well, hurt is not always easy to see right away. For instance, do you know that people who live together before marriage have a higher rate of divorce? Despite that people think it gives them a chance to test the relationship first, the reality turns out to be that living together makes people treat the relationship more casually, and to make less of the commitment part of it.

Secondly, God designed sex to bind people totally together—mentally, spiritually, and physically. It’s supposed to express a loving, total commitment to each other. It’s like tape on a piece of paper: it works best if you do it right the first time and not try to take it off for use another time. You can try to have sex without commitment (and many people do), but we’ve all learned how hurtful that can be, and that it can also steal some of the meaning of sex in a committed relationship.

Third, sex can hurt the relationship. By having sex, you vastly, if subtly, change your relationship. Friendship, closeness, and commitment all get redefined. Emotional needs and dependencies change, and very powerfully. Sex is a mysterious force, and it has emotional and spiritual power that are hard to pin down. Marriage is the ideal relationship to mine its riches and use it to help you grow as a couple. Outside of marriage, even while living together, those powerful feelings can end up hurting the relationship. Even if you become one of the relationships that makes it to the altar, your foundation for marriage isn’t as strong, and the statistics say that your chance of success is worse.

Fourth, it can hurt each of you, because your love relationships change who you are. Sex isn’t just an activity—it’s part of our whole sense of who we are. The pain that comes from a broken sexual relationship is triple the pain from a normal broken romance, and living together—sharing stuff and living space—complicates such things to an even far greater extent.

Fifth, it can hurt your future partners. In the event that you don’t end up staying together, you still carry to your future partners, including your future spouse, a set of habits: ways of thinking and acting in your relationship, both emotionally and sexually, ways of treating each other as people, and as bodies. If sex expresses little real commitment now, it will express little real commitment then. You could hurt the person you love the most, both now and later.

So, that’s one scenario. If they want to live together because they plan to have sex, the Bible would say, “Absolutely not.” But what if they claim (and I just have to snicker, you know) that they are not going to have sex, stay in separate bedrooms, just living together (with nothing immoral talking place)—is that OK? Well, the problems with that are at least twofold: (1) you are setting yourself up for powerful, almost irresistible temptation, and (2) everyone is going to assume you’re sexually active, so what will that do to your testimony as a Christian who keeps him- or herself pure before God? 1 Thessalonians 5.22 says to avoid every kind of evil, and that would include even things that look like they’re ungodly. If Christians are supposed to live lives of purity, run away from immorality, keep the marriage bed pure, not do things that are wrong or even look like they’re wrong, and not cause weaker Christians to stumble or be offended—what was the reason again for wanting to live together with your “partner” outside of marriage? And, I will ask, since you live by the Bible, what part of the Bible are you obeying by doing so, and how is Jesus both honored and pleased by your doing that? That’s the question they have to answer.