No Sex Before

I was thinking about the famous behavioral norm "no sex before marriage," and immediately had the thought that there's a weirdly wide space of unclaimed possible no-sex-before rules.

Then I realized that this isn't exactly true, there are other no-sex-before rules.

And then I thought I would catalogue some existing and could-be-existing rules:

• no sex before age 21 (I don't think I've ever heard of this one, interestingly?)
• no sex before second date (i.e. "I don't do that on the first date")
• no sex before third date (Carrie Bradshaw rule)
• no sex before exclusivity
• no sex before love (I don't think I've ever heard this either?)
• no sex before meeting their parents (or best friend, or something)
• no sex before engagement (19th Century rule, supposedly?)
• no sex before marriage
• no sex but yes everything-else before marriage
• no sex before subscribing to the Atoms vs Bits newsletter (important)
• just no sex (priest/nun/shaker rule)

I'm very intrigued by "no sex before love" – I don't think I've ever heard anyone even talk about it as a possible norm, but it's got an intuitive plausibility to it. Sure, it's less concrete than marriage or n dates, and to the extent you're waiting for mutual love then the other person could lie about it. But it seems philosophically appealing, and I'm surprised it doesn't have more traction.

Another one I'm interested in is "no sex before you meet their parents" (or, less effectively, best friend). It feels like "willing to introduce you to their parents" is at least for some people a credible signal of genuine interest. But perhaps it's too confounded by different people's varying baseline parent-introduction-willingness to work. "Willing to introduce you to their colleagues/friends/something" maybe has some of the same impact, but not all of it.