When sex is practiced outside of marriage, you are misusing it and there are personal and interpersonal consequences. Sex outside of marriage is incomplete, because it doesn’t have a binding union as its basis. So when you have sex outside of marriage, what you are really saying is, “I want to have physical union with you, but not the entanglements of any other kind of binding union.” Most people don’t consciously think like that when they are having sex before marriage, yet, that is what they are doing and communicating—no matter how much they say they care for their partner.