In traditional courtship, as practiced in the West until about 1920, and also as practiced most everywhere else as well, not only is there no sex before marriage, but there is not much of anything else, either. No kissing above the wrist.
When the husband kissed the bride at the wedding ceremony, it was, ideally, literally their first kiss.
If you read the novels of the nineteenth century, as I have been doing recently, virtually all of them (especially those written in English) have courtship (getting married) as a major plot element, at times nearly the only plot element. Jane Austen, who focused on this entirely, characterizes the pattern.
You would think that the first kiss, if it was a normal, institutionalized sort of thing, would be a big dramatic moment, as it is in old-fashioned Hollywood movies or cheap romance novels. But, this is never mentioned.
This contrasts with a common condition today, where women who are supposedly “saving themselves for marriage” will do just about everything one can do, potentially even “going to fifth base,” excepting vaginal penetration. Which is, actually, a normal outcome once a couple begins kissing. Also, a lot of the hormonal bonding and other “brain chemical” reactions that take place during sex, also take place during these kinds of foreplay activities, even if in a less intense manner. The result is that a girl is, hormonally speaking, in a pseudo-marriage. She is “going steady,” and if she breaks up with her boyfriend, she experiences similar trauma. This reaction is why the first kiss is important.
If this seems extreme, remember that it was matched by the fact that a lot of women got married at age 18. Courtship was not something that you drew out over fifteen years. It was something that you did once in your life, and it didn’t take that long. At age 19, these women were getting more dick than even slutty girls today, because, when you are sleeping together in the same bed every night, and you are nineteen years old, it just happens.
Cornerstone 