Sometimes I wonder if sex before marriage is the key to a good marriage.

Some religions forbid sex before marriage but sometimes I wonder if sex before marriage is the key to a good marriage. After all, if the sex isn't good, how can the marriage be good? It's just a question that you might have the answer to. Read the following and feel free to respond with your words of wisdom. (The following is copied verbatim from the source cited. For more, contact the website.)

SEPTEMBER 9, 2015

18 Men Explain Exactly How Sex Is Different With Someone You Love

Daniel Hayes

 

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1. “For me, having sex with someone you love feels like you’ve ‘found’ something. There’s a real sense of discovering something that was missing before, a completeness that you don’t get from random hookups or even with long term lovers that you’re not in love with.”

—Luke, 27

2. “It is different. It’s so different that I actually think it might be the best way to tell whether you’re in love with someone or just in lust with them.”

—Oliver, 26

3. “The thing I noticed the most about having sex with someone I loved for the first time was that there was real humor and happiness involved. Like, we joked and smiled the whole way through. The sex was super satisfying of course but I remember afterward saying ‘that was fun’ and actually feeling joy instead of worrying about how I’d performed, etc. That was a real shock for me.”

—Nathan, 22

4. “Technically, I’ve had better sex with women that I wasn’t in love with than I have with women I have been in love with but at the same time I generally enjoyed it less. I’m still kind of getting my head around that.”

—Jonathon, 23

5. “People are always talking about how sex with someone you love is better but I don’t really see how that can be true. Sex is sex, either you have chemistry and know how to do it or you don’t. I don’t know how love could magically grant anyone mystic sex powers that suddenly make it better.”

—Ian, 24

6. “I’ve wondered about this a lot and at the risk of trying to explain something that probably has to be experienced to be understood I think that when you love someone you’re just more likely to trust them and when you have mutual trust you have better sex that’s mostly stress free.”

—Leo, 27

7. “This is really something men don’t talk about when it’s just ‘the guys’. I think that we’re told by society that A) Sex is dirty and awesome and that B) If you’re in love then you should never say so. Sex with someone you love can be actually transcendental and by that I mean you transcend your ‘self’ and become emotionally intwined with the person with whom you’re sharing that love. It’s a miracle if you ask me and we’d all be better off if we admitted how wonderful it is to feel that way.”

—Marc, 33

8. “The first time I had sex with someone I was in love with it scared me. It was just such an intensity of feeling that I immediately kind of freaked out and literally started shaking. The way I grew up and having the parents I had really explains this. There wasn’t much affection in the house. We were always emotionally on our guard. There wasn’t any trust. It took me some time to figure out what I was feeling and love making sort of ended up as a kind of reparative therapy for me. We’ve been married five years now and I feel like meeting her rescued me from what might have been a very sad and loveless life.”

—Jack, 28

9. “The first thing I noticed the first time I was with someone I was in love with and that was in love with me was that she seemed to really be into my pleasure in this really free way. I’d never come across that before.”

—Charlie, 25

10. “There’s definitely an isolation I’ve always felt during and after hookups, even when I really liked the person, that’s definitely showed me the meaning of ‘la petite mort’ (the little death). When I’ve had sex with someone I really loved I never felt that.”

—Tyler, 26

11. “For the most part, I’ve always enjoyed sex with someone new because you get to find out all about this new person and what they like and don’t like. There’s a lot of excitement in it but it’s definitely different from sex with someone you’re in love with. The best way I can describe is that it’s like you’re doing something with someone else instead of doing something to them.”

—Julian, 29

12. “It’s 100% possible to still have bad sex with someone you’re in love with. What I’ve found in my own life though is that bad sex with someone you love is still way better than good sex with someone you don’t love. For one thing, you don’t feel the need to leave right afterward.”

—David, 28

13. “They’re different, yeah, but as long as you’re not expecting love where there isn’t any then I think both can have their place. Where a lot of people go wrong and, I think, especially girls, is that they expect to feel love during hookups when that’s not what hookups are about. Making love is about being with someone you love, hookups are about sex or alleviating loneliness.”

—Jake, 30

14. “Sex is better with someone you love for the exact reason that literally everything is better with someone you love.”

—Tom, 22

15. “One thing I notice about casual sex is just how little effort people really put into it. If for no other reason, sex with someone you love is better because both of you are trying.”

—Jeremiah, 26

16. “Sex with someone you love is really different than sex with someone you’ve just met or haven’t known very long. There’s nothing like the adrenaline that comes with the sort of rowdy, casual sex you have with someone you just met at a club but there’s also nothing like sex that’s deeply intimate and that can be just as rowdy. The difference is that the former doesn’t have any meaning to it. The latter does.”

—Mark, 26

17. “The sex is different, yes. Is it better? It can be and when it is better it’s a lot better and when it’s bad it’s just okay. However, some of the best sex I ever had was with people I wasn’t in love with.”

—Evan, 24

18. “Sex with someone you love doesn’t have any of the ‘locked inside your head’ self consciousness that hookups have, in my experience.”

—Anthony, 23 

Daniel Hayes

Daniel is a Writer for Thought Catalog.

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Writing prompt for National Poetry Month, April 2017: How do you know you're in love?

Question: 

How do you know you're in love? How many times have you been in love, and how many precious memories do you still have? If you could turn back the hands of time and if you could relive the moments of being in love, how would you describe that love?

Process:

Writing a short narrative or a prose poem is a good place to start writing if you're not an experienced poet. You spend less time thinking and more time just writing, relaxing and allowing thoughts to flow.

Example in prose:

My first love is not easy to determine because it just is not, but the way to write anything is to keep writing for three to five minutes, allowing the mind to free-flow, while trying to keep the question in your mind. Let's see...I had a boyfriend who loved me but then I had a fiance whom I thought I  loved until he hit me in a state of jealousy and nearly broke my jaw. It crackled for months. In the whole scheme of things, my first love seemed to love me about as much as he loved himself, which wasn't enough for either of us, so it didn't last, but I think that might have been an instance of true love. I'm writing freely right now, but I want to stop or I might be forced to cover evidence, and that's not the point of writing at all, at least not when the purpose of the writing is to get the creativity flowing. So I'll stop with this, but I wrote a poem earlier, a poem which is more a series of questions than anything else. If I planned to write a longer poem, I would focus on something in the poem--the emotion, the images, the message and I'd build upon that. The trick is to start where you are and continue writing without worry, without erasing, and without stopping. After getting started you can continue. Once you think the writing is finished, you can go back and add whatever you think the writing needs. An example of poetry writing follows:

Example in poetry:

How do you know when you love someone?
After you've seen their face or smelt the musk
Of a hard day's work and thought,
How beautiful? Or is it much simpler,
Like how your entire soul cringes
When they say hello or good night?
Or is it how you take flight,
Fearing a heavenly
Lock down?
                          (c) by Mjia Johnson 2017

How would you spend your last day on earth?

Someone somewhere asked this question: "How would you spend your last day on earth?" I thought for a second but it didn't take long before my muse responded. What follows is not a poem, but with some poetic restructuring, it could become a prose poem. Here's what I was inspired to write:

If today was my last day on earth, I'd spend it with family, teaching them how to pray in my final moments, telling them stories my mother told me, explaining how important it is to be free because being owned by anyone in any form or fashion, living in fear of being hurt or exposed, is like living on borrowed air, which would be a travesty because there is nothing sweeter than fresh air. I would share the importance of Nature-- wolves and tulips--and people. I would share words of Emily Dickinson: "Tell all the truth but tell it slant/ Success in circuit lies..." I would teach them to be proud because there is no one on earth born with their particular gifts, so the trick is to be proud of your gifts and cling to those who appreciate you. I would tell them to listen to people and sounds of Nature more than they speak and to ask the right questions. Then, we'd have oxtails, curry goat, empanadas, coconut cream pie, listen to great music and dance until I was ready for sleep & prayer.

How would you spend your last day on earth? 

Blind obedience is what I learned as a child. She made me, stamped me "Made in America," and left me her story to share.

Blind obedience is what I learned as a child and if I spoke out or spoke up, I'd be scolded or spanked and ignored for half the day. I had no time to sulk, never thought I deserved to, so I ended up keeping my emotions inside. That's all well and good, but unless you express how you feel, it's hard to determine how you feel. Self-expression is a form of defining and asserting who you are, and it has a very empowering effect.

My mother was a beautiful, proud and dignified woman who was a product of her up-bringing in the old South on a 240 acre farm with two parents and sixteen children. She learned the value of hard work, respect for self and others, education, and obedience to parents and elders. Her father warned her about men, especially fast ones from big cities, and most definitely against those who didn't attend church. She listened respectfully as her father spoke, one day left the farm and traveled west, where she met her husband, my father. 

After their divorce, she held us accountable for maintaining her father's proud legacy of high moral values and obedience and made sure we did everything she, herself, would have done in terms of keeping to tradition and keeping quiet when elders or superiors were talking. Each day, she left a strict plan of action and returned home with everything in place.

I was never my mother's favorite, but I was care-taker of her house, and she taught me everything she knew. She was quiet-spoken yet uncompromising. but she left me with gems of wisdom to last a lifetime. She made me laugh and she made me cry, but through it all, she made me, stamped me, "Made in America," and left me her story to share.

I knew my mother, but it took a while before I learned who I was because it was unacceptable to boast, self-express or complain. Being quiet and invisible never entered my mind because "Children were to be seen and not heard." It had always been that way and it was an established tradition in the South, especially in the Mississippi South. 

Although I didn't talk back, I loved to cry when I felt hurt. I felt like a disobedient child when I cried but it allowed me to process negative emotions, which will find a way to escape, as indeed they should.

But that was a generation ago and things have changed. Psychologists, mental health associations, researchers and educators emphasize the importance of self-expression for emotional growth. It's never too late to learn all you need to know about yourself. But self-knowledge begins with self-expression.

Are you a procrastinator? If you'd like to change anything, "Knowing is half the battle." (G.I. Joe)

I'm a writer who sometimes procrastinates, but sometimes, it's not what it seems. I'm often working on a strategy to a writing project, redesigning a poem or taking a break so as to reconstruct or deconstruct it all, but in my eyes, it's part of the job. Then again, I wonder if I'm simply just procrastinating. 

There are several types of procrastinators and different ways to procrastinate, so how do you know? To answer the question, I consulted a few sources, but I like the following response I excerpted from www.mindtools.com:

How to Overcome Procrastination  

Follow these steps to deal with and control procrastination:

Step 1: Recognize That You're Procrastinating

If you're honest with yourself, you probably know when you're procrastinating. But to be sure, take our Are You a Procrastinator?  self test.

Here are some useful indicators that will help you know when you’re procrastinating:

• Filling your day with low priority tasks from your To Do List.
• Reading e-mails several times without starting work on them or deciding what you’re going to do with them.
• Sitting down to start a high-priority task, and almost immediately going off to make a cup of coffee.
• Leaving an item on your To Do list for a long time, even though you know it's important.
• Regularly saying "Yes" to unimportant tasks that others ask you to do, and filling your time with these instead of getting on with the important tasks already on your list.
• Waiting for the “right mood” or the “right time” to tackle the important task at hand.

Am I a procrastinator? My answer to the question is, yes and no. What I do about it depends on whether I like the way I flow or if I want to change anything. But at least, I know. What about you? Are you a procrastinator? If you'd like to change anything, "Knowing is half the battle." (G.I. Joe)

Love for others includes many attributes, but compassion is probably the most important part of love.

Most spiritual practice and religious scripture emphasize attributes like humility and having love and compassion for others. Yet, very little time is spent explaining the importance of self-compassion and self-love. Although it's not emphasized, being able to "love your neighbor as yourself" indicates a need for self-love before all else. Without self-love and self-compassion, it's difficult to have love and compassion for someone else.


Love for others includes many attributes, but compassion is probably the most important part of love. Compassion involves being sensitive to someone's suffering and having a deep desire to alleviate their suffering. But in order to experience compassion, you must first consider the pain someone is going through. In other words, you must not only step into someone's shoes but also you must step into their pain and suffering. Once the pain and suffering are acknowledged and vicariously experienced, compassion includes a deep desire to help someone out of their unfortunate situation.


Self-compassion is more difficult because you must acknowledge your own humanity with a sense of respect, understanding, and kindness. It demands having patience with your own frailties and shortcomings and not falling into patterns of guilt, self-blame, name calling and destructive self-talk or behavior. It means caring enough about yourself to care for yourself and accept your imperfections. It's assuring yourself that with faith and trust in your ability to overcome adversity in life, you will overcome whatever the challenges might be.


At this point in your life, you have established patterns of behavior. By now, you are either good or not so good about the way you manage your thoughts and how you treat yourself. With self-compassion, you make it a point to handle yourself with care. You use self-talk that is gentle and encouraging rather than harsh and demeaning. Paying attention to your thoughts and feelings allows you to confront negative thoughts as they come your way. This allows you to remember your sense of humanity and know that you are not alone. Then you are able to replace negative or belittling statements like, "I'll never be good enough," with positive and encouraging ones, like, "I'm only human. I'll do better tomorrow."


Compassion for self allows you to have compassion for others. Recognizing and fighting negative thoughts requires that you become mindful of your thoughts and feelings and that you accept weaknesses as well as strengths. By accepting your human frailties and encouraging yourself when you're feeling down, you build self-compassion and strengthen self-love. If you can weather your own emotional storms and support yourself when you're feeling down, when it's no longer your turn to nurture yourself, you'll have the love and compassion to nurture someone else. 

Sometimes angels walk among us, protecting us. You know them because when they arrive, everything changes for the better. But they can't stay very long.

Before she came, there were two parents instead of one and there was fighting, violence and betrayal until she chased the culprit away. There was controversy, of course, because none of the other children glowed in the dark and none of the other children slept the entire night after they were brought home from the hospital. She was different, and although she never cried, everyone sitting in the church pews knew that unfamiliar glow that surrounded her. Still, they all kept quiet about the matter. Besides, there was nothing to prove she came to the wrong family. 

Who knew the married couple would divorce, break the family apart and that she'd be on her own with no one to guide her and nothing to indicate she was loved--though she was, if not all of the time at least some of the time, enough of the time for her to grab a moment or two, slip them into her pocket and store them away like precious gems.

She talked to herself, told herself stories, and made herself laugh every day. If she found something good to eat, she laughed, and when she found nothing, she laughed as well. That's how she survived after they deposited her to the missionaries and moved away. Her childhood behind locked doors was spent capturing positive moments and saving them for a rainy day when there was nothing to do, But at least the hard times were over. No more walking the streets, hiding in shadows or sleeping underneath benches at Grace Episcopal Church. Laughing in spite of the hard times, she had made it though rain, sleet, snow and the most dreadful heat and humidity.

She created happiness, moment to moment, savoring one encouraging word and then another until she was nearly fifteen and still living in the orphanage where she met Dee at the nurse's station. The attraction was immediate, but because the boy was so kind she loved him enough to do him the favor of breaking up before breaking his heart. Still, he lingered, tarried, and sought to be near just in case she needed him which she never did--until after he was gone.

They were kindred spirits, both had agreed. It was probably a heart attack or something sudden or so she thought, because he would never willingly try to escape. After a while, she began to regret the fact that she barely even knew him for sure and couldn't determine what made him stay with her through the years knowing she had missed too much love to manufacture enough for anyone, not even for herself. 

After turning eighteen and being set free, she hitch-hiked and walked from town to town hoping she'd see his face across the counter, his strong assuring hands serving up drinks while she held out her glass for another round. But it never happened. All of the hopeful men liked buying drinks, but they were not her angel in disguise. Sometimes she expected a knock on the door, a hand sliding her a bologna sandwich and a soda after curfew, but it never happened. The boy named, Dee,  had simply vanished.

"Cherish the day," is what he had said while she was in captivity and she wondered, how? "I should have had his baby and stayed connected because he was an angel, and when he thought there was no more work to be done, he disappeared." The woman at the counter had nodded and smiled.

Having his baby was the miracle she thought she needed, living proof that she had been loved. Now, it was up to her to find ways to live each day and to love herself, like it was the most important thing she could ever do. Some people insist that Angels walk among us, teaching, protecting and inspiring us. You know them because when they arrive, everything changes for the better. If you think you've met an angel, maybe you have, but learn what you need to learn because they don't usually stay very long.