Ain’t this the truth: Before marriage the devil tries everything to get you in bed with a guy, and once married, he tries everything to keep you out.

Sex before you tie the knot, but no sex or bad sex or arguments about sex after marriage, and you’re all tied up and angry or hurt.

Now, before I write another word, this post is for all my readers: married, single or single again (through divorce or death). Why? God made us sexual beings. Our gender and how we think and feel about sex touches every relationship.

Our sexual identities begin at the beginning: conception then birth, pink for girls, blue for boys. Many summers ago, my son, then 9, helped a friend capture a frog at our neighborhood park. They carried the frog to the friend’s house, he got a butter knife and together they cut of the poor from back legs. The frog then invented the front-legged hop, and so my son told me, all jacked up and ready to find another amphibian.

I called the hubby and related the story.

“Steve, should I worry that our son is becoming a psychopath or is this a normal boy thing?”

“A normal boy thing,” he replied.

“Are you sure?”

“Yep. Gotta get back to work.”

While I preferred tree climbing to hopscotch and jeans to dresses, I never ever would have amputated a frog’s legs in my girlhood. It would never had crossed my budding feminist mind. These were the early Seventies, baby: “I am woman, hear me roar.”

Like girls may age, I bought into the modern notion that “as long as you love the guy, sex is alright.” I knew a lot of high school girls who were “doing it.” I just had not yet fallen in love. The prevailing post-modern notion my daughters and son hear is much different: “If it feels good, do it. Just pick a hot one and tell your friends all about it the next day in the school hallways.”

A teacher friend subbed for a year at an affluent suburban junior high. She couldn’t believe the hallway talk. She said the girls were worse than the guys, along the lines of  “I hooked up with him and him last weekend. This weekend I’m gonna hook up with that guy.” Keep in mind: These are seventh- and eighth grade girls talking sex with no limits. A game. A dangerous game.

Before marriage the devil tries everything to get you — and your daughters, granddaughters and neices — into bed with a guy.

I heard that the #1 dance song hit a couple of years ago was:

You and me baby, we ain’t nothing but mammals
So let’s do it like they do on the discovery channel

According to the Guttmacher Institute, only a small percentage of children under 15 years old have had sexual intercourse. (I wonder the number if oral sex were included.) However, by age 20, 75 percent of teens had had sex outside marriage, with the number for men and women nearly even.

You may have slept with your boyfriend before marriage. You didn’t “keep the devil out of bed” and now your current relationships — your husband, your children, even God — are affected.

How are they affected? So what can you do? What do you do with the guilt and shame you may feel?