Why does almost every guy I know want to have sex before the wedding?

I can’t speak for almost every guy.

It’s an unfortunate stereotype that men are only interested in sex. Plenty of people (women included) want to get married and be mostly sexually compatible with their spouses. Plenty of people don’t want to get married but do want to be sexually active with willing partners.

Unfortunately, in many conservative/traditional contexts, sex was (and in many places, still is) considered a rite of passage into manhood that could be obtained before marriage (although that’s not the ideal), whereas women were and are to deny any sexual experience before wedlock in order to preserve the outdated notion of their so-called purity.

What you might be observing is the tension between many young men’s unfortunate socialization to prove their worth through obtaining sex from women and women’s equally problematic socialization to prove their worth by withholding sex from men to prove their marriage “worthiness.”

I hope you can see the problems with this setup.

• It erases trans identities and non-straight/asexual orientations.
• It reduces men to the role of sex seekers and women to the role of sex givers.
• It compromises real consent and enables rape culture.
• It lacks nuance and disregards variation among individuals.
• It places individual worth on a series of socially-generated gendered behaviors rather than intrinsically unique human qualities.

If you’re a person that wants to wait for sexual activity until after marriage, you’re guessing about sexual compatibility with your potential spouse. Maybe that doesn’t matter to certain people (as long as they’re compatible in most other areas).

But for people (not just men) who consider sexual compatibility to be a very important aspect of their intimate relationships, committing to a legally-sanctioned relationship without discovering beforehand what their partner is like in bed is unacceptable.

I don’t know what the religious, cultural, and social expectations are like in your society. If sexual exploration outside of traditional marriage is considered taboo or highly discouraged where you live, people that chafe at those restrictions are going to try to find workarounds to those limitations.

Hopefully they’ll do so while respecting consent/bodily autonomy plus having a thorough sexual education and easy access to barrier protection and contraception. Hopefully the people in your area that want sex outside of marriage go about having it with individuals that want what they want and want them back. Hopefully they don’t pressure reluctant potential partners into doing things they’re uncomfortable with. Hopefully they protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies and STIs.

Unfortunately, conservative and traditional societies don’t tend to provide the very things that would reduce unwanted outcomes and actually encourage dishonesty in order for noncompliant individuals to save face publicly.

I think it would be best if those individuals didn’t have to rely on hope, could be open about their preferences, and be supported in their choices. That way you could reliably filter them out of your dating pool if abstinence before marriage is important to you.

All the best.