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We avoided getting involved sexually in any way before marriage.
•We did not sleep over at each other’s places.
•We did not hang out in each other’s rooms alone.
•We did not handle each other’s personal money (except during dates. She handled mine) 🙂
•We did not access each other’s personal forms of communication i.e. mobile phone calls, text messages, emails, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
We avoided exposing our nudity to each other e.g. swimming when alone. We had friends tag along always
These may seem as trivial things but when unmarried folk engage in them they create a recipe for disaster. When your relationship couch is intruded while you act married, you most likely will end up looking like the guilty party when you speak up. Why? Some of the things I mentioned, e.g. sexual involvement, create infinitely deep bonds between people. When an intruder comes into the couch, there will be no confronting them without first dealing with your own insecurities. You will panic when he receives a call from that girl. You will be depressed when you see him talking to her. You cannot respond to the exclusivity without addressing your insecurity of losing a bond you should have reserved for a marriage. If you’ve breached some of those lines, don’t be downcast. There is no rulebook that says you cannot have a brand new start in life!
Exclusivity creates
I am forever grateful for a wife like Turi. She gathered courage, bit the bullet, and confronted me squarely about how she felt. When you are exclusive without acting married, you retain a mind of your own concerning things that affect you and you earn the respect of your partner. I respected Turi for the confrontation. I respected her even more when she declared that her sexual expression was for her marital bed and her husband. I respected her more when she chose not to answer my phone even when I wasn’t around.
Dealing with Insecurity
Turi and I also drew our security deeply from having a personal relationship with Christ Jesus. She and I knew that even if you don’t do all the things I mentioned in the list, you could still act married and be insecure if your identity is in your relationship. We got insecure severally and we chose to deal with it permanently. We chose NOT to have our relationship define us. Instead Christ’s love for us defined us. We would choose Christ over each other on any day, even today. We cultivated our personal relationships with Christ so that by living for Him, we pleased each other consequently. Because Christ was first in our priorities, He enabled us to relate well in our other areas. It wasn’t perfect though. I grew jealous once in a while. She grew envious too at times, but Christ was the north-point we defaulted to every time our insecurity threatened to rise and consume us.
exclusive love
Be exclusive; don’t act married
When I say exclusive, Beloved, don’t get me wrong. Some couples act married when they are not and call it exclusive. That is not exclusivity. Acting married when you are not can ruin great positive respectful friendships with the opposite sex because you constantly feel threatened. A mature mark of a relationship is a healthy relationship with other members of the opposite sex within respectful boundaries. There’s a fine line between exclusivity and acting married; that line is called insecurity. You cannot track down every member of the opposite sex and tell them to keep off your man.
You will scare everyone off and eventually scare your partner out of the relationship. To avoid the insecurity that manifests itself by acting married when we were not, Turi and I simply agreed that we would not subscribe to marriage behaviour before we got married. Here are a few of the things we avoided to stop acting married: