Promiscuity

As I am sure you know, the first great memoir in Western civilization was the Confessions of St. Augustine. The Bishop of Hippo was the most important and influential of the group of theologians now called fathers of the Church. His memoir was not only the first great memoir; it remains, as best as I can tell, the greatest.

Anyway, among Augustine’s most famous dicta is this, apparently from the Confessions:

O Lord make me chaste, but just not yet.

Nowadays we are so sophisticated that we find such a prayer to be absurd. We do not take it seriously. We believe that when we marry we ought to bring a wealth of sexual experience to our conjugal beds. Some people insist that they have try-out sex before getting married.

It has something to do with compatibility, or so they say.

As for Augustine, he did not marry, but he did convert to Christianity, and embraced a newfound sexual purity. I will leave the theology to you.

Anyway, a recent research report tells us that being chaste before marriage is a good indicator of marital felicity. Promiscuity, as it used to be called, does not prepare one for marriage. It prepares one for an unhappy marriage.

Here is a summary of the report:

A new study by researchers at Brigham Young University in Utah echoes a substantial body of research to conclude that a certain degree of premarital sex could impact your future relationship prospects.

Experts in family studies at BYU’s Wheatley Institute have shown that 10-20% of married adults who have only had sex with one person – their spouse – reported having a happier and higher quality union than those who had many sexual partners before getting hitched.

They found furthermore that those who had had only one sexual partner were almost three times as likely to declare that divorce is not on their mind and twice as likely to report that they were “very satisfied” with their marriage.

One assumes, because one has largely surpassed the age of reason, that this all refers to the females of the human species. In fairness, the researchers suggest that the same rule applies to males.

Here are the statistics:

Just one in 10 married people who label themselves as “highly sexually experienced” could say they’re “very satisfied” in their marriage, according to the 30-page report.

Only 25% of married people who had 5-9 sexual partners, and 14% of those who had been with 10 or more, reported a “very high level of relationship stability in their marriage.”

On the other hand, 45% of those deemed “sexually inexperienced” reported the highest degree of stability. Moreover, nearly 80% of those who have had sex only with their partner reported greater emotional closeness in their relationship, which is over 20% higher than people who had multiple sexual partners before they got married.

Allow me to read your mind. Doubtless the people who defer sexual experience until they are married have a different attitude toward marriage than do those who are, excuse the expression, promiscuous. 

Even given that case, the strange part about it all is that promiscuous sexual behavior is a bad indicator for a good marriage. 

Obviously, we live in a culture where college students and even high school students believe that they ought to be hooking up with their cohorts. And you know that those young people who do so tend to hook up with people they barely know and who they will not see again. Evidently, their casual attitude toward relationships and their generalized promiscuity either does not speak well of their willingness to commit to another person or else it produces the liberated habit of doing what they want, when they want, with whom they want. Obviously, this is not a formula for a happy marriage.

At a time when young women are suffering from all manner of emotional distress, and when many of our most serious psycho professionals are blaming it on social media, is it not strange to read that promiscuous sexual behavior might be contributing to the problem?

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