Youth is Wasted
What does youthful pre-marital sex matter? Don't our experiences show that if you avoid pregnancy, disease and heartbreak, it is essentially a 'victimless crime,' some harmless fun? Well, what is the condition of our sexually-active youth? Are they satisfied with their situation in life?
First, consider the September 29, 2017 opinion column in the Wall Street Journal by University of Texas professor Mark Regnerus, entitled "Cheap Sex and the Decline of Marriage." Prof. Regnerus confirms the validity of the dating maxim, 'Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?' That is to say, men are less inclined to marry when sex is available without marriage.
According to Prof. Regnerus, though, this goes far beyond longtime girlfriends frustrated their boyfriends won't propose. Rather, sexual norms have become so debauched that a third of young men start sleeping with their sexual partners before dating them. Young men are becoming less and less inclined to make sacrifices — any sacrifices — to get sex. Sex is so easily available that if a girl won't provide sex as easily as you want it... well, just move on, another will.
Both young men and young women still claim that they want to get married... eventually, after they've had the fun of youth. On their view, marriage is what you do when you're old and sex has become less interesting. They see marriage not as the beginning of sex but the end of it. So they give no thought to what sexually-healthy marriage looks like, or how to achieve it. The idea that the rewards of marriage may require something now (prudence, discretion or — gasp! — chastity) is completely alien.
Prof. Regnerus quotes a young Texas woman who exemplifies the confused sexual ethic of her generation. Asked if a woman should expect a man to make any sort of sacrifices for her before having sex with him, she says, "Yes. Sometimes. Not always. I mean, I don’t think it should necessarily be given out by women, but I do think it’s OK if a woman does just give it out. Just not all the time.” So... just go with your gut? Live in the moment? Ride the wave? This is what happens when a whole generation's primary source of wisdom is coffee mugs, t-shirts and tattoos.
Now consider David Brooks' June 23, 2017, op-ed column in the New York Times, entitled "Mis-Educating the Young." Brooks examines the overall state of America's twenty-somethings. They are in general finishing their educations later, leaving their parents' homes later, beginning steady careers later, buying their own homes later, achieving financial independence later, etc.
These delays are generally not welcomed either by the young people experiencing them or by their worried elders; in fact, they are deeply dissatisfying. Why is this happening? Calling it "one of the oddest phenomena of modern life," Brooks characterizes the situation like this: "Childhood is more structured than it has ever been. But then the great engine of the meritocracy spits people out into a young adulthood that is less structured than it has ever been."
This lack of structure means that twenty-somethings "bounce around... with different jobs, living arrangements and partners while hoping that all these diverse experiences magically add up to something." All this floating around brings "uncertainty and anxiety;" every new commitment — a job, a residence, a lover, whatever — causes them to "feel trapped" instead of secure, which in turn leads them to escape... and so the cycle begins again. And of course all the while social media makes it look like their peers are doing more, loving more, enjoying more.
Unfortunately, the young are surrounded by advice that exacerbates the problem rather than ameliorating it. Society emphasizes virtues like self-knowledge ('Get to know the real you') or freedom ('You can do anything you set your mind to'), rather than more grounding virtues like perseverance or duty. The only remedy Brooks suggests is that "colleges have to do much more to put certain questions on the table," i.e., the Big Questions About the Meaning of Life — as if more collegiate navel-gazing will solve this problem.
My suggestion is that the problems discussed in these two columns are actually very closely linked. The unlinking of sexual activity from marriage over the past sixty years has caused men and women to delay marriage from the beginning of their twenties to the end of the decade. (According to the Census, men in 1950 got married on average at 22.5, and women at 20.3; men in 2016 got married on average at 29.5 and women at 27.4.) And without the sacrifices, stability, support and structure of marriage to serve as backbone for this segment of society... they float free, unmoored from 'real life' and unhappy about it. They've lost any sense of purpose in career; they can't muster the discipline necessary to save for financial independence; they can't seem to persevere in love; they've become dissatisfied and uncertain in virtually everything.
Marriage is obviously not a panacea. On its own, it does not create jobs, happiness, savings, or anything else that twenty-somethings are currently lacking. But if society were to re-conceive of marriage — not as an economic bargain between two rational actors, not as a skirmish in the eternal war between the sexes, not as a power structure to be subverted, not as shackles on youthful fun, not as a useful device for the transmission of genes — but as the mutually self-sacrificial pinnacle of human intimacy, bolstered by sexual monogamy... well, then I venture that the floodwaters of many of our other social ills would gradually begin to recede.
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