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| Lolo Jones, athlete and virgin. (©Ian Walton) |
All of this is true, and the post itself is certainly less
of a gloat-fest than was his
post on waiting until the wedding night to get busy with your loved one. But Crowder has been married for the
Hollywood eternity of six months: not enough time to really understand the
challenges of making a marriage last “’til death do us part”, and therefore not
enough time to develop something I like to call “empathy”. But not even when chastity was much more
common (and divorce much less quotidian) did marriage automatically bring these
benefits to all and sundry. So if people
take issue with the self-congratulatory tone of his writing, I can’t say I
blame them.
Nevertheless, we need more couples to get married and stay married, the
latter even if just for the sake of the children and avoiding that messy,
traumatic and costly process called divorce. Even more, though, we need people to get
married for the right reasons, and not just to socially validate their sleeping
together. We also need people to get
over the idea that the three-bedroom house in the ‘burbs and combined
six-figure income somehow precedes and insures successful marriage and
childrearing — it just ain’t so.
Anyone who’s read me with any regularity over the last
plus-or-minus five years has seen me rail with some frequency over sexual
stupidity. I freely and ashamedly
confess that I’ve been stupid myself, though with nowhere near the frequency
our sex-saturated culture expects of the unmarried. The point is, I realize that maintaining
chastity in a world dedicated to getting people to boink whenever and whoever
possible (thank you, David Addison!)
is pretty damned difficult. Not impossible, just difficult.
Nevertheless, sex without marriage is unwise.
First, technology
fails. You know this every time your
car breaks down, every time your debit card gets refused when you have plenty
of cash in your checking account, every time your computer freezes up. Why do you have this insane expectation that
birth control will work all the time every time … especially when it’s trying
to prevent the body from doing what it was designed
to do? As for STD control, prophylactics
just aren’t as effective as some people want you to think. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: contraceptives
are for suckers.
Second, when you’re
chaste, “to abort or not to abort” is no longer a question. For women, there is no better expression of
reproductive autonomy than to walk away from a sexual opportunity when you’re
not ready for children. “No” is an
empowering word; “no” puts you in the driver’s seat. For men, it simply isn’t fair or just to women
to put them in such a terrible quandary, to force them into either single
motherhood or a lifetime of guilt and regret, because you don’t want to be a
daddy just now. “No” is your declaration
of full manhood, your ability to consider the consequences to others of your
actions. Ask any alcoholic: If you can’t
say “no”, you’re not in control.
Third, the “try before
you buy” plan doesn’t work.
Statistics show that couples who cohabit before marriage have higher
divorce rates than do those who start living together after the wedding. Worse, splitting up when cohabitation fails
is really no less messy or painful than a divorce, even for lack of lawyer
involvement … which, if there are children involved, is no longer a savings of
cohabitation. To paraphrase Yoda, “‘Try’
not! Marry. Or live together not. There is no ‘try’.”
Fourth, men and women
aren’t substitutes for masturbation.
Masturbation itself may be natural if
by that you merely mean that it occurs among other animals, but it isn’t by definition
“healthy”; in fact, there’s a negative correlation between frequency of
masturbation and psychological health. Sex in and of itself is not love; the sad truth is, you don’t
even have to like the person you boink. When marriage and (especially) childrearing
are off the table, sex reduces the partners to masturbation tools regardless of
conscious intent. There are ways to
physically express affection other than sex.
Last, there’s nothing
a lover, or series of lovers, can teach you about sexual technique that you can’t
learn in tandem with a spouse. A
person who’s experienced may be a better lover, but that doesn’t necessarily
translate into being a better husband or wife.
Sex shouldn’t come with a book of records or a scoreboard. Your partner should never feel s/he has to compete
with anyone in your past; and you should never feel compelled to compare your
partner with your first lover or the last person to warm your bed.
Celibacy isn’t for everyone.
That’s precisely why St. Paul recommended that such people marry and not
refuse their spouses’ conjugal rights: “[Each] has his special gift from God,
one of one kind and one of another” (1 Cor 7:1-9). And when he said, “For it is better to marry
than to burn,” he wasn’t writing of the fires of hell — at least I think he wasn’t. Nor does marriage and parenthood have to be
drudgery, let alone slavery; contrary to feminist groupthink, marriage exists
to give mothers and children legal claims on fathers, not to subject women to
second-class citizenship.
But in writing this, I’ve barely begun to touch on all the
ways that sex outside of a marriage open to children has potential for wrecking
your life. Sex, in its proper context,
is Man’s participation in God’s creative act, a revelation of divine Love
working in our lives.
Outside of that context, it’s just not all that. In fact, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
