Sex, Relationships, and the Value of Human Restraint

Recently, two articles concerning the relative merits of premarital sex appeared on Associated Content: Leena Ingegneri's Why Sex Should Be Saved for Marriage and Mr. Absolute's Open Response . In short summary, Ms. Ingegneri wrote an essay detailing the reasons she has personally chosen to abstain from sexual intercourse and Mr. Absolute replied with a juvenille riposte saying there's no reason to wait until one is wed.

Before going further with my own opinion, I want to make something clear. First, I write nothing here from the perspectice of my religious beliefs, nor do I fall back on disease prevention. Many may find this odd, but what I write has its basis primarily in social evaluation and philosophy. With that respect, here are some blunt, cold-as-I-can-make them facts:

1. The divorce rate has skyrocketed in the last century.

2. Researchers have found that couples who live together before marriage have significantly higher divorce rates than those who do not.

3. A study in the 1990s found that between 1965-1988, women who abstained from sexual intercourse before marriage had a significantly lower risk of marital disruption than those who did not.

4. In both 2 and 3, researchers attributed the discrepencies not to a direct causal effect, but rather to indirect mitigating variables (such as people who chabitat or have extensive premarital sex are less inclined to marriage and traditional norms than those who do not).

5. Stable married individuals report higher sexual satisfaction than sexually-active single people or couples in unwed monogamous sexual relationships, and the levelof satisfaction rises when the married couple claims they had sexual restraint before marriage.

Regardless of how one personally feels, and regardless of what hackneyed rationale one comes up with, these five points cannot be ignored when debating this issue. Individuals who say they want to live together as a "test drive" before marriage and claim it will make their marriage better if they do get married are lying. People who use lines like "you just have to have sex with someone before marrying them, it's like buying a dairy cow without tasting the milk," have simply not looked at the facts. The cold, hard truth is that people who "only eat one kind of ice cream" are doing a heck of a lot better than people who sample the whole menu.

I'm not going to argue for a second that everyone should wait until their wedding night to have sex. Considering that the average marital age is in the late 20s and that hormones kick in about fiteen years eariler, I find that a wee bit unrealistic for pretty much everyone, though I find it laudable.

The rule here is that we're human beings, which gives us two sets of operating instructions. On one hand, we have the biological urges of animals. Sex is a primal urge of secondary importance (no, Mr. Absolute, it is not a primary urge...those would be eating, sleeping, shelter, etc.), and as such our bodies scream at us sometimes to reproduce and carry on this pathetic species. But at the same time we have to respect our humanity. We define ourselves as human beings by not becomming robots to our biological urgres, by building institutions like marriage.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant once derived a paradoxical moral law, which, in simple terms, is that to have true freedom is bind one's self to a moral code of ethics. The grand point made by Kant and countless other philosophers is that asserting humanity involves restratint. We put ourselves above other animals because we behave morally and ethically.

There is a value to restraining your biological urges, and if you cannot understand that now, I'm not sure I can explain it in an article of this size. We as a species should not eat everything we can, drink everything we can, or screw everything that moves. Despite what our legal system says, gluttony and promiscuity threaten our moral being just as much as theft and murder because they rely on humanity releasing their self-imposed restraints.

Given the data set above, and understanding that moral life is built upon self-containment, I advocate waiting to engage in most sexual behavior until one is absolutely sure that the relationship has a solid foundation and not one based in temporal lust. Happy, healthy, long-term relationships are never built upon sexual activity; rather, they are founded on trust, security, and well-being. This should imply that a relationship can thrive without sexual intercourse, but that sexual intercouse cannot thrive long-term without the other things. Far too often couples mistake physical intimacy with emotional intimacy to the ruination of their own relationships.

Do I know when that magical period is when one is confident their relationship is based on friendship and not physical attraction? No. For some, it could be within a few weeks. For others, it might take a year. Like I said, I think waiting until marriage is wholly unrealistic in most cases, but there is a heavy value in human restraint.

In one paragraph in his article, Mr. Absolute states the following: "Celibacy isn't a cure for relationship woes...if it were, it would be a lot more common trust me on this. (sic)"

No, nothing is a cure for relationship problems, but if you put off the biological urges, you are guarunteed that the reason you are with another person is because they are actually compatable with you and not because they give you a stable fill of the secondary biological needs, and make no mistake, many relationships between teens and college-aged individuals exist simply because of a once physical attraction and that superficial stability.

I am not writing here that sexual relationships (even one-night stands) cannot blossom into fantastic lifetimes of happiness. All I want to do is point out the fact that people who wait to have sex or live together have happier marriages and couple it with the necessity of human restraint. In his book The Paradox of Progress, writer Gregg Easterbrook writes about our society has gotten freer and wealthier and "better than ever," but we as a people are less contented with our lives than our ancestors. Make no mistake, much of our general malaise has to do with the rejection of time-tested reasoning and human restraint.

And so, with respect to Mr. Absolute's article, there are two additional passages I would like to point out. In his closing, he quotes Ms. Ingegneri and then claims that "if you think the one gift you bring is the hymen between your legs, then you have a lot to learn." Earlier he uses an anology about "only eating vanilla ice cream all your life."

Both of these indicate severe problems with the general philosophy of modern times. First, the value in waiting is more than just "a hymen;" the benefits of putting off sexual activity longer than your biological urges will you is not a bodily one, it is a mental one. The most powerful romantic organ we have is not our "naughty bits," but our brains. Our age wants us to forget our minds and look straight to our bodies - to buy a new car and to covet our neighbor's grill or house to the detriment of our humanity and our mental well-being. Second, ice cream is an inanimate object devoid of feelings. Let us please not compare that to a human being with whom you have a nurturing relationship. And furthermore, if one is fantastically content with the sexual activity one is getting (you know, like the people who took the survey in number 5 above), why on Earth would they go hunting for more?

Because the grass is always greener, right? Because someone else always has a nicer car than me, right? Because the woman at the store said my freezer is ten years old and it's time to look into a new one, right? And, honey, there's this lovely place in the suburbs if we only get another loan, right? Is that it? Because they want more more more more more more more?

Maybe I'm antiquated in this thought, but genuine, long-term contentment is the highest human goal, not massive consumption. Genine long-term contentment usually involves having stable friends, the highest and best of which is a trusting and supportive spouse. Given the data set above and understanding human nature and friendships, one of the ways to mitigate getting into a bad relationship seems to be putting off sex until you and your partner are confident what you have is a valuable, viable relationship.

Yes, I've written all of that as a 23-year old who's never been married. But what I have written is based on actual statistics, basic moral philosophy, and about ten years of observation. What observation? Well I've seen friends entangled in bad relationships based only on giving each other a stable sexual outlet. I've lived in a culture of high shcool and college students that highly promotes instant gratification of biological urges with anyone who becomes the object of lust but paradoxically engenders greater depression and higher stress levels (students are more prone to go to the Pyschological help center than join fraternities or sororities, true fact).

Of course, I've also seen the opposites in pretty every way imaginable, and some day I might disreagrd everything I've written - I acknowledge this - but the facts are the facts and logic is logic and everything I have seen, read, learned, and yes, experienced, tells me that even saying "no" to your genitals just once or twice and putting some earnest thought into it can make a world of difference in leading to generally happy, healthy (physically and mentally) lives. And to be frank, isn't that what we all want, anyway?