Why Teens Who Don’t Have Sex Are Happier
Last week, a national-championship-caliber university basketball program suspended its star forward for the rest of the season when it discovered he had broken school rules by sleeping with his girlfriend.
Thus, Brigham Young University prioritized moral integrity over winning ballgames. In fact, it effectively torpedoed what has been a dream season in order to uphold its honor code.
That’s tough. Truth is, it’s practically unheard of in the moneyed, morally slick world of college sports.
But guess what? It sends an extremely strong message that rules are rules, and no one is exempt—and that is going to help a whole lot of people make better choices in their own lives. This was a decision made by grown-ups who care about young people. It is a hard-won victory worth incomparably more than a better season record.
This kind of principled moral reasoning is surely responsible, in large part, for another bit of good news: that more and more American teenagers and young adults are abstaining from sex.
The largest, most in-depth federal report ever on sexuality in the U.S., released this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, shows that between 2002 and 2008, the percentage of 15-to-24-year-old female virgins (and by that I mean those who said they’d never had any form of sexual contact) in America grew by nearly a third, from 22.7 to 29.9 percent. Among males of the same ages, the number grew one quarter, from 22.6 to 28.3 percent. For 15-to-17-year-olds, among girls the number rose from 49 percent up to 58 percent, and from 46 to 53 percent among boys.
How refreshing. Considering America has somewhere near 10 million teens in that age group, these statistics represent hundreds of thousands of individual and family victories. In a culture that is becoming more and more sexualized, it takes guts to battle against the tides of immorality. Such successes don’t come without effort, even struggle.
These reports are particularly worth celebrating in light of an increasing body of evidence showing the benefits to young people of their waiting to have sex until they are physically, mentally and emotionally more mature. Even the New York Times, reporting on the cdc study, cites data demonstrating “a significant correlation between sexual restraint and emotional well-being, between monogamy and happiness—and between promiscuity and depression.” Abstinent young people are happier, healthier young people. The more of them, the better.
These correlations are particularly notable among women, the Times noted, “which may help explain why overall female happiness has actually drifted downward since the sexual revolution.” A recent major study showed that “the happiest women were those with a current sexual partner and only one or two partners in their lifetime. Virgins were almost as happy, though not quite, and then a young woman’s likelihood of depression rose steadily as her number of partners climbed and the present stability of her sex life diminished.”
Considering the risks that accompany promiscuity—and the younger it begins, the greater they are—such findings shouldn’t surprise us. One quarter of sexually active teens contract a sexually transmitted disease. The danger of infection is greater among young people because of the biological susceptibility of less-mature sex organs. And it almost goes without saying that such activity also creates or contributes to problems like unmarried pregnancy and abortion, births and single parenthood, and poverty among mothers and children.
Clearly, the fruits of early sex experience are rotten, and they aren’t just physical. Teenage girls are over three times more likely to feel depressed a lot, most, or all of the time if they are sexually active, and almost three times more likely to have attempted suicide, according to one study. Teenage boys are eight times more likely to try to kill themselves if they are sexually active. Other surveys show that sexually active high schoolers are 50 percent more prone to drop out of school and 60 percent more liable to be expelled. They are also half as likely to graduate from college. Even among teens from identical socio-economic backgrounds, sexual activity dramatically hurts academic performance. Sexually active college students, living out the dramas of making and breaking sexual relationships, have lower grade-point averages than their chaste peers, they seek counseling more often and are more apt to consider their relationships stressful. Early sex experience is also proven to decrease the odds of later marital stability.
The growing availability of such evidence has surely contributed to the decision more and more young people are making to hold off on having sex for now. Advocates of abstinence-based sex education have also played an important role in promoting virginity, and they are rightly celebrating the trend.
Another, deeper lesson emerges from this data. It is no accident that premarital abstinence produces good results. There is a vital reason.
Abstinence works because it follows the moral law set in motion by the Creator.
God created sex as a wonderful blessing for mankind. Like everything else, He also gave laws to show how to use it correctly. Just like food can build your health or break it depending on what you eat and how much, sex can strengthen your life—or take it from you.
God tells us to “Flee fornication” (1 Corinthians 6:18), which is all sexual activity before marriage. He forbids adultery (Exodus 20:14), which is all sexual activity outside of marriage. And He encourages married couples to have sex (1 Corinthians 7:3-5). He does this all for our good—to build our relationships, to strengthen families, to edify our character, and to increase our happiness, vitality and personal fulfillment.
Anyone who believes these God-given moral laws are irrelevant or “done away” should honestly consider the curses plaguing those who break them and the blessings accruing to those who keep them.
The truth is, God’s law is an invaluable gift, and we would do ourselves a world of good to respect it. As Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in his booklet What Is Faith?, “God’s law is, simply, love! It is the perfect way of life. Every particle of human suffering, unhappiness, misery and death has come solely from its transgression! It was given to make man happy, and is the only philosophy of life that can do so! It came from a God of love, and love is the fulfilling of the law! (Romans 13:10).”
