By Olusola Adeyegbe
When is the right time? It is the question every courting heart eventually faces, and almost everyone answers it too quickly. Not by the calendar. Not by how long two people have known each other. Not by social status or the silent pressure of what others seem to be doing. These are surface questions yielding surface answers. What actually governs this is something far more serious, something that bypasses the visible entirely and reaches into the quiet interior of both souls. Two requirements, not one, and both must be fully present before the body has any business speaking at all. The first is purity of thought on both sides. Not self-deception, not romanticised lust dressed in the language of love, but genuine clarity of intention. The second is deeper still: a perfect spiritual harmony between both souls, a quiet convergence of inner worlds so complete that physical union becomes not a starting point but a natural culmination, the body finally expressing what the spirit has long already known. Where either of these is absent, what follows is not intimacy but transaction. And transaction, however pleasurable in the moment, quietly empties the soul. This is not merely true outside marriage. It holds just as firmly within it. For where there is no spiritual harmony, even a marriage bed becomes, in the truest sense, a place of dishonour for both parties.
Courting is itself a sacred act of discovery. Two people are learning whether their inner worlds are compatible, their values, their tenderness, their vision of life together. Sex introduced prematurely often short-circuits this delicate process. The body speaks loudly. The spirit speaks softly. And when the body dominates too soon, the spirit’s voice becomes harder to hear.
The true price of casual sex is rarely visible on the surface; it is paid inwardly, in the slow erosion of self-knowledge and the quiet loss of one’s own moral compass. The lingering emotional residue after a loveless encounter is real. Guilt, quiet confusion, a faint erosion of self-worth are the body’s way of signaling that something sacred was treated as something disposable.
True chastity, it must be understood, is not physical abstinence. It is purity of thought. Even within physical union, chastity can reign where both hearts are honest, where no one is being used, where spiritual harmony already exists between two persons. The body in such a union is not debased. It is elevated. Physical union in this light becomes something quietly powerful, an intimate exchange that produces not emptiness but greater strength in both souls.
So the question, when is the right time, answers itself naturally when two people stop asking how far can we go and start asking how deeply do we truly know one another. When thought is pure, when harmony is real, when the soul has been fully heard, the body follows without shame and without regret.
The soul speaks first. The body, at its best, simply agrees.
