Let's cut to the chase, sex is good.

The stereotype is that God and the Christian people think that physical intimacy is something bad and dirty, something to be discussed as little as possible and if you have to, make sure it is done discreetly. Scripture makes it crystal clear that sex of any kind should be reserved for your wedding night and it should serve to honor and grow closer to the person that you're going to spend the rest of your life with.

It's never comfortable for anyone to talk to their parents about sex growing up, especially if you come up in a more conservative home. Growing up Christian doesn't mean you will be absent of these questions and once late high school and college come around, you will be left to your own devices or to the advice of your equally clueless friends.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the average American loses their virginity (defined here as vaginal intercourse) at 17.1 years of age. Seeing that schools only teach the science of it all to 9th graders to check it off their list of required electives for graduation, chances are that by 17.1 you have forgotten it all and you're still bound to have a lot of unanswered questions about not only the physical aspects of what's going to happen, but you probably haven't even begun to consider all the emotional and mental factors that accompany it.

Then after high school, if you're heading into the big scary world of an American college campus, there are even more variables on the table for you to consider.

So whatever you believe in, here are 7 practical reasons why waiting until marriage to have sex makes sense:

1. Waiting helps you establish a stronger mental and emotional foundation for a romantic relationship.

Any romantic relationship is made up of many parts, but three of the most notable are the mental, emotional, physical connections. For someone that you plan on spending on any extended period of time with, the connection needs to extend past a physical attraction.

No matter how attractive you may find someone or how "sexually compatible" you two are (I'll discuss that more in #7), eventually you'll start digging to see what else that person has to offer intellectually and emotionally. A physical attraction can very quickly dissolve if you feel like the person never understands what you're talking about when you get into the ethical dilemmas of self-driving cars or your thoughts on multiverse theory.

Emotionally, the person also has to be squared-up and present about what you want out of the relationship. When physical intimacy precedes more immersive mental and emotional intimacy, people tend to treat it casually and use it as a placeholder for deeper dialogue and some aspects of the relationship may fail to develop completely.

2. Sex should be the culmination of a relationship, not the foundation.

Dating in 2018 looks a bit like this: meet someone, go out on a couple of dates, then according to a Groupon study somewhere between date five (when men on average find it appropriate) and date nine (when women on average find it appropriate) you will begin to know each other more intimately.

In the absolute best case-scenario, it happens again and again and after more of the same and some life milestones you two may move in together and after a while you might take the next step and get married, do some traveling, start a family, etc. This all sounds great, but something is going wrong.

The American Psychological Association reports that 40 to 50 percent of marriages in the United States end in divorce. Obviously, no one marries with the intention of divorce and there are some cases where divorce is not only justified, but necessary.

That being said, repeating the same method and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, so trying something new might pay off in the long run.

3. Waiting helps build self-control as individuals, then together.

There are studies out there that claim that discipline dissipates the more you use it, essentially that willpower is a limited resource. However, self-control and self-discipline are key components being successful in anything, including, but not limited to health, work, school, relationships.

Making a choice and sticking to it is called conviction and what begins with personal decision can over time become a walk alongside someone else that shares your end goal. The essence of conviction is saying yes to the decisions that are worth it, then saying no to the decisions that are not.

The beauty of willpower is that you are in complete control if it and it's a learned skill that you can apply to all the aspects of your life, including those just mentioned. Learning to say no to yourself will prove to be one of the most important skills you could ever learn, you will thank yourself.

4. Waiting makes you less likely to question the intentions of your partner.

According to Psychology Today, there is a concept known to rapidly deteriorate relationships called a "fantasy bond". A fantasy bond happens when one or both individuals in a relationship form the illusion of oneness without substantiating it with anything meaningful.

As the name implies, the couple prioritizes form over substance and whatever connection they had prior to the formation of this begins to deteriorate.

You can form fantasy bonds unintentionally for plenty of reasons, one being that you had a bad falling out with a partner and you have to convince yourself that you care about them as much as you used to for the sake of being comfortable and because they present a sense of familiarity to you that is comfortable.

As toxic as this is in the long run, it's not as bad as when a fantasy bond is formed purposefully.

Example: You know someone likes you more than you like them, you have no intention of committing to them long-term, but you tell them what they want to hear to get what you want out of them. This duplicity and deception takes the place of transparency and integrity, messes with the other person's reality and is objectively unbecoming of a person.

Waiting until marriage does not guarantee you'll be free of manipulation, all kinds of people always make poor decisions, but making the decision to wait and being open about it with people you are getting to know romantically does a good job of filtering out these fantasy bonders, helping you establish a deeper level of trust and saving you some trouble down the line.

5. Waiting will make your wedding night and marriage more meaningful.

YouGov surveyed 711 married adults in the UK and one in five said they did not have sex on their wedding night with that number rising to 32 percent when only couples under 40 are considered.

Many attribute this to the fatigue of the wedding festivities, but is this a possible red flag? The consummation of the marriage is deeply rooted in tradition, but in a 2010 peer-reviewed study conducted by D.M. Busby of over 2000 married couples of all ages found that not only did waiting lead to more satisfying sex lives after marriage, but they reported that their marriages were more stable and satisfying as well as having better communication with their partners when compared to their counterparts who didn't wait.

6. You will be much less likely to take physical intimacy for granted.

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Anticipation and delayed gratification make you appreciate everything so much more. One down-side of rushing into things too quickly is that you miss the build up and the possible rewards. The Marshmallow Experiment, a psychological study published in 1972 conducted by Stanford professor Walter Mischel and his team observed the behaviors of hundreds of children around the ages of four and five.

In essence, the researcher made a deal with the child — he left them with one marshmallow and told them that he was going to leave the room. If they waited until he got back 15 minutes later they would get a second marshmallow, if they couldn't wait and ate it, then that's all they would get.

So they could have one treat now or two treats later. What the researchers found in their follow up studies measuring the progress of the children throughout their lives was pretty remarkable. Children that could restrain themselves grew up to exhibit higher SAT scores and lower levels of substance abuse and obesity than their anxious and hungry counterparts.

What this essentially means is that delayed gratification is a powerful attribute that enables you to see the bigger picture, to sacrifice a little now for something better down the line.

7. Good sex before marriage does not equate to good sex after.

Married couples that engage in physical intimacy less than ten times a year are considered "sexless."

Newsweek and The New York Times have respectively reported that 15 to 20 percent of American marriages are in a sexless marriage. One of the most common questions that make people apprehensive to waiting is "What if I'm not sexually compatible with the person?"

It is important to consider the nature of that question, because it is a very important one. Since the commitments of marriage are based on time or "til death do us part" one should also consider time for "sexual compatibility." This question implies that if you wait and happen to not be sexually compatible with your partner after marriage, this is not only a problem, but a problem without a solution.

For anyone with past sexual partners, I would challenge you to recall your feelings of sexual compatibility with that person at the apex of your relationship compared to now. Were they as good as you told them they were then? Maybe you meant it and maybe you still think so, but was sexual compatibility enough to keep you together? If the answer is no, then why do you feel that if you married someone for every other part of themselves, sexual compatibility is important enough to separate you.

You may be surprised what anticipation, some communication, and a little effort can do for your compatibility when you have a whole honeymoon to figure it out.

All in all, it wouldn't be fair of me to give you the good without giving you the whole picture.

There will be times when you feel like an outcast, where you're going to have people that you like lose interest in you, there's not really cultural support to back you up – you won't find many of your mainstream role models practicing celibacy or abstinence – like anything else, it's a mindset and you have to lay it all on the table and find your reason to wait and this reason needs to be your own and genuine and it needs to lock you down.

Additionally, you need to remember, that you can start whenever you decide to, waiting will be considerably more difficult if you or your partner have already done it respectively or together, but it's not impossible and it yields the same results. If you fail, you regroup, make changes to your environment in order to not do it again and move forward.

ALWAYS MOVE FORWARD.

If growing old with someone is what your "two marshmallows" look like, waiting your 15 minutes might not be a bad way to get there.

Photo by Jasmine Wallace Carter from Pexels