Is it allowed to kiss your future bride?

Question:

I have a question regarding kiss. Is it forbidden to kiss your future wife? I am not yet baptized and I met a wonderful girl that I intend to ask for marriage. I do not want to fall into sin with her before baptism nor to tempt her.

Is it allowed to kiss your future bride?Here is the short answer …

It is not allowed

Why? Because you have not yet entered a covenant with her and your wedding was not officiated before God and before witnesses. The kiss of lovers stirs up their passion and it can lead to the sexual relationship, which in their case will be fornication. If they commit adultery before they enter the covenant, they will stain, or how the Bible says, will defile their intimate relationship and they will reap the consequences for the rest of their life. God said very clearly:

Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled; for fornicators and adulterers God will judge. (Hebrews 13:4)(NASB)

If you allow to play with fire and through kisses and caresses to go to the sexual relationship before the marriage ceremony is officiated, you will commit fornication and this will defile your marriage bed, that is your sexual relationship. Then do not complain that you do not have the pleasure you expect to have when you make love, because you yourselves have wasted and you have trampled this pleasure and altogether the purity of the relationship of your love.

Do not stir up a fire

When the Christians of Corinth asked him about the sexual aspect of Christian life, the apostle Paul has written as follows:

Now concerning the things about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman. (1 Corinthians 7:1)(NASB)

Paul was not referring here to hold or to kiss the hand when you greet a woman, nor the friendly hugs when we meet at church, or the holy kiss that we give each other on the cheek. He referred to those touches a man makes of his sexual passions and arouses sexual desires of a woman. Even if after your engagement you will be strong and you will not come to fornication, the fact that you allow kisses and caresses to which Paul referred in the quoted passage, will put you under a permanent and torturing pressure of the unfulfilled sexual desire and this is good neither for the one who initiates it nor for the one on which these caresses and kisses are directed.

You will have remorse and shame

When I am counseling the bride and the groom before I officiate their wedding, sometimes the bride or groom told me ashamed that they allowed to kiss with kisses which provoked them sexual desires, but especially a feeling of shame and guilt. Every time I felt bad that I could not announce their first kiss before God and before people who came to the wedding. But I felt worse when I heard another time that they began to bring charges against one another that they hadn’t kept clean until marriage and those charges have produced pain and injury. This is the way how conjugal relationship is affected by these kisses and caresses before marriage.

Translated by Felicia Rotaru