A Bonding of Souls

CAUTION: What follows here is a highly blunt and honest post (like so many of mine are).  I share for the benefit of fellow travelers on this road of life, so they may be wary the pitfalls before them...

~~~~~

When I was in Christian high school, it was hammered into us (several times a year), that sex was EVIL.  The argument went something like this (my paraphrase of multiple lessons pulled from the recesses of my faulty memories):  

Sex creates a bond between two people that can never be broken.  God intended this bond to be created only within the marriage relationship, with the intention that it would serve to bring the husband and wife together in an unbreakable bond.  And that is why you should never have sex outside of marriage.  

If you do have sex with someone, it's like gluing your soul to theirs.  (Enter object lesson here: hold up two different colored construction paper hearts and glue them together).  This is fine as long as you're in a strong and stable relationship with that person.  But look what happens when the bond is made and then broken... (Tear the two hearts apart from one another and note the remaining bits of paper stuck on each of the hearts from the other).  You leave a bit of yourself behind.  The more you bond with various people in this way and rip those bonds apart, the more shattered and torn your heart becomes (you can figure out how this works in the object lesson, right?)...

So, of course the theory/argument is... Don't have sex and you won't have this problem.  Great lesson for teens, right?  

WRONG!

I'm  not debating the truth in this lesson.  There is something about saving sex for a marriage relationship that I obviously think God had figured out.

My problem is this... there are other ways to bond one's soul to someone else.  I would know.  I'm still dealing with a few wounds of my own in this "soul bonding" area in past relationships that have absolutely NOTHING to do with physical acts of sex. (And, not to get on a side trail, there are those that can convincingly argue that there is the ability to have a physical act without any actual soul bonding taking place.)

So here's the thing... The bond begins long before the first physical touch.  If you let a person inside your soul, there will be a bond... and that will do far worse when it's broken than just "leaving a few pieces of yourself behind"... 

Frankly, it will rip your soul to pieces.  And while time, space, and a healthy dose of grace and forgiveness can heal the pain, there will always be a scar.  Even when you're "over" one another and no longer share in that way, the person who put that scar there, will ALWAYS be able to rip it back open again, unless you figure out how to stop them.  

And if you do... please let me know.  

I'm tired of bleeding.