Intimacy: Our Latest Sexual Fantasy

Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa may not have precisely stated that promiscuity is a boon to society, but that was the message the average college freshman got. Similarly, there are messages about sex percolating down into our high schools and junior high schools today, messages that bode ill for the traditional Christian approach to marriage and sex. But first, some background.

It is a major preoccupation of culture—some would say the occupation of culture—to decide how to organize itself around sexuality. For the last fifteen hundred years, up until about 1950, Western culture had a consensus on this. Of course, the Old Consensus was often broken, and it did change with the times (when, for instance, parents stopped arranging marriages). But the taboos (incest, adultery, divorce) and the goal (lifelong, monogamous marriage) stayed reasonably stable.

This Old Consensus was pretty close to what we find in the New Testament, though it did not originate there. It took the monogamy prevalent in the first century and elevated it, preaching in the strongest terms against divorce, against adultery, against prostitution, against any “safety valves” that some have held to be harmless, even helpful, to the strength of the institution. The New Testament’s monogamy is a pure monogamy.

And it is a loving monogamy—not merely a convenient social compact, but a covenant to be filled with love as a cup is filled with wine. There is an important distinction here. Nowhere does the Bible say that love is the basis for marriage; marriage is the basis for love. Paul’s command is “Husbands, love your wives” rather than “Men, marry your lovers.” Within marriage one is to love—within the covenant set up between not merely individuals, but families, and enforced by the church and the community. Marriage is easily defined in legal terms, has a beginning that can be dated precisely, has behind it all the authority society can muster. It is an institution, which love is not. Ideally the two should be congruent, but the institution assumes biblical priority. The cup is necessary before the wine is poured.

Western society added two unbiblical elements to this framework. One is the double standard. A man who broke the rules was often winked at, but a woman who did the same was ostracized. Also added was a degraded view of sex, as belonging to humanity’s lower nature. The Bible, for all its strictness about sex, takes a profoundly positive view of it; but the church, perhaps influenced by Greek philosophy, came to think that its spiritual leaders should all be celibate. Though the Reformation brought marriage back into honor, the belief that sex was from our dark side persisted.

Between 1945 and 1955 the traditional inclination in favor of monogamy, after centuries of stability, was badly shaken. The Sexual Revolution began, probably not because some freethinkers wished it so, but simply because of penicillin and the Pill. The first could cure syphilis: sleeping around no longer meant risking your life. The second prevented babies, and thus suggested that sex’s connection to family was unnecessary. Sex could, for the first time in history, be separated from life-and-death consequences. Understandably, people’s views of sex became more liberal, and so did their behavior.

The Rejected Playboy Experiment

Christians, believing that a pure and loving monogamy is God’s idea, are anxious to see society return to the way things were, although we would not want to give up such changes as a positive view of sexuality. Since America has recently grown more conservative, some hope the Old Consensus is coming back. But it is not. Sexually, the pendulum swing to the past has been extremely modest, if perceptible at all.

What has happened is that the Playboy experiment has been rejected.

The Sexual Revolution spurred a variety of views on sex, and the Playboy experiment was only one. Hugh Hefner probably did the most to convey it to the masses, but others said essentially the same thing with more sophistication. They often referred to Sigmund Freud and his theories about sexual repression, but their real intellectual ancestor was Jean Jacques Rousseau, who thought humanity in the wild state was naturally good and happy, and was spoiled by society.

That such dreaming should endure for two centuries is remarkable, for to this date no happy “natural” humanity, unspoiled by society, has been found. (An occasional “wild child” is found in the forest, but it has proven difficult to call his inarticulate, animalistic behavior happy and good.)

Men and women inevitably live in society, and societies always have ways of organizing their sexual behavior. Humankind is not naturally anything, if by “natural” we mean without social imperatives.

The Playboy experiment, however, blamed much unhappiness on sexual repression. It urged people to act on their blessedly natural sexual urges. A good number of people tried life by this ethic, and some are still trying it. But we can now call the experiment a failure. People lost interest in it, discovering that they wanted love more than sex. “How to have a good relationship,” not “How to have good sex,” is the editorial foundation of most general interest publications today.

Did the Playboy experiment fail because sexually transmitted diseases (STD’S) scared people away? I doubt this was the main factor. Sex is an urge not easily scared off; homosexuals were dying by the hundreds before any advocated closing the baths. All the centuries of syphilis before penicillin did not put prostitution out of business. What made the Playboy experiment a failure for most people was not AIDS or herpes or chlamydia, but loneliness. Masters and Johnson chipped in by pointing out that sexual pleasure was highest in a caring relationship. A new ethic began to evolve: the Ethic of Intimacy.

Intimacy: Not Exactly Love

To some traditionalists, this may look just like the Playboy experiment, because under it most people expect to pair up with a number of partners during their lifetime. But the Ethic of Intimacy is quite distinct. For one, it is moderately positive about marriage. You do not see much written any more about the crippling inhibitions society imposed; the Old Consensus is no longer an enemy so much as an unrecapturable past. Sexual freedom is a given in the new ethic, but it is not an end. It is to be guided by the ideal of intimacy.

Intimacy is not love exactly. It is a state that two people may feel for a night, or a month, or a lifetime. Though women’s magazines contain a good deal of advice on it, intimacy is a quality you cannot precisely plan. Most people would say, I think, that you know it when you feel it. The Ethic of Intimacy offers no behavioral absolutes, but many attitudinal absolutes, such as openness and caring.

The Old Consensus did have behavioral absolutes, for its linchpin was marriage. You could define right and wrong as precisely as you could define marriage. Today the demarcations are blurry, either coming in or going out of relationship. Couples are expected first to sleep together, then live together in a kind of trial marriage, then finally (if things work out) ratify their state in a ceremony.

Going out of relationship, divorced and widowed people are now included as “singles”; they are lumped with people who have never been married, as though marriage had made no difference. Ultimately, people are categorized as “currently attached” or “available.” That is why women’s magazines do not use the terms “husband” and “wife” much any more. The current terms are generic: “partner,” or “lover.” This is not antimarriage. It is mildly positive about marriage. But marriage does not come first. Intimacy does.

The Ethic In Outline

Let me outline seven features of the Ethic of Intimacy:

1. A positive view of sex within intimacy. Any threads of the old belief that sex belongs to our lower nature seem thoroughly gone. Sex is wholly good, so long as it is done in intimacy. One-night stands still happen, and they are pardoned as excusable, almost inevitable. However, one-night stands are far from the ideal. A person searches for that fragile state of intimacy wherein sexual intercourse becomes an expression of caring.

2. The independent individual. Always, within intimate relationships, two watchful individuals retain their independence. They consider their own needs paramount. You will not find this stated so much as assumed. Picking at random a copy of Glamour, I find Bette-Jane Raphael writing, “I believe that we all have the right to decide what to disclose to our partners. Some relationships are more open than others, but that doesn’t necessarily affect how they finally fare.

“No one, not even my partner, is entitled to know everything about me. Why should he know that I once stole crayons from Woolworths when I was a little girl?”

In the same issue, in a monthly column entitled “Sexual Ethics,” Priscilla Grant writes, “True lovers give each other permission to retreat; no lengthy explanations or excuses are necessary.”

Intimacy, by the new ethic, never controls the individual; the individual always remains free. No covenant binds one person to another through absolute obligations. An individual’s primary covenant is always to him/herself.

3. Compatibility. If you ask what creates intimacy, the answer in a word is “compatibility.” This does not particularly mean sexual compatibility. Time was when the rationale for couples sleeping together before marriage was, “How else will they know whether they are sexually compatible?” By now, though, nearly everyone knows that couples are not sexually incompatible as a Ford transmission is incompatible with a Honda drive train. They are compatible or incompatible in personality and psychology.

Nonetheless, this is usually seen as relatively fixed. Compatibility just happens—you “click.” Of course, people do change over time, so couples who are compatible today may not “click” tomorrow. That is why you cannot be too rigid in your proscriptions against divorce or adultery. Nobody favors divorce or adultery, but against incompatibility, who can stand? Happy, lifelong monogamy is less a triumph of the will than a miracle of compatibility. You hope you and your lover can stay balanced on the bubble indefinitely. But you admit the forces of fate may ruin your plans.

4. Sex as a private matter. Whereas under the Old Consensus society felt a need to protect itself by punishing aberrations, under the Ethic of Intimacy society has nothing to do with it. What you do and with whom you do it is up to you. The moral majority can live how they please, but they have no right to tell others how to behave.

5. Sex with no necessary consequences. The Old Consensus treated the move from virginity to experience as a change in a person’s very being, and Hawthorne was not far off in printing a scarlet letter into Hester Prynne’s skin—so deeply was sex supposed to influence a person. Today people make less of sex. Intercourse is thought to mean different things to different people at different times. Whether a person is a virgin or not, whether he or she has had one partner or dozens, tells you very little about the person.

By the Ethic of Intimacy, virginity is a meaningless mystification, used to keep “good girls” good. Some people have bad sexual experiences, but with counseling they should be able to get over these. Guilt feelings are not necessary. The broad assumption is: People will have sex with numbers of people while trying to “click.” Some experiences will be good and others not so good. But every time, with every new partner, you have a chance to start afresh. The past is merely prologue, not predictor.

6. No double standard. Today women are treated exactly the same as men sexually. If sexual feelings are right for one, they are right for the other. If you wink at one’s roving, you should wink at the other’s.

7. Sex requires maturity. The Ethic of Intimacy is situational; each person must consider a number of variables in knowing what to do, and what is right for one person might not be right for another.

But applying situational ethics requires maturity and wisdom, especially when sex and its emotions are involved. Many people doubt whether kids are capable of it. They feel uneasy about this doubt, because of point four: Sex is a private matter. What right do they have to impose their opinions on anybody, even kids?

Ellen Goodman, writing in Ms. magazine about the ambivalence of parents trying to convey a new morality to their kids, quoted a woman with a 13-year-old daughter as saying, “We’re trying to communicate a situational norm, like, it’s okay under certain circumstances. If you both honest-to-God want to. If you think you’ll be in each other’s lives for a while. If you are responsible. If you use birth control, if you are old enough, if you won’t get hurt, if you have a wholesome sexual experience.” Commented Goodman, “Her list of ‘ifs’ extends into the air.”

Despite this uncertainty, an uneasy consensus has emerged that kids 16 and under are too young for sex, and should be told so.

What’s Wrong With Intimacy

Christians can hardly be against intimacy. We want it, too. What we must say, I think, is that the Ethic of Intimacy is too weak—too weak to deal with the powerful human urges, often destructive, always potential, that make up our sexuality. It is like walking a lion on a leash. Sometimes he goes where you want him to. Sometimes he will not. Sometimes he turns around and devours you.

The Ethic of Intimacy is inherently vague; under sway of emotions you can convince yourself anything is intimate. And there is a strange current of passivity and fatalism in it—a surrendering of self to the gods of eros—which undermines human dignity. For if compatibility is the key to intimacy, we are at the mercy of circumstance. Either we are with the right one—or we have missed and must start over. The Christian ideal places a person’s will (not emotions) at the center: Love is work to be done, and intimacy is to be created through persistent self-sacrifice. The Ethic of Intimacy puts our efforts in a much less-important place.

Because of these weaknesses, the Ethic of Intimacy does not live up to its own standards. It does not create or enhance intimacy. It merely glorifies it.

Christians have another concern. A pure and loving monogamy reflects a pure love of God. As Paul tells us, husband and wife are like Christ and his church. We must train ourselves to be monogamous both with our spouse and with our Lord. If we lose this singularity in marriage, we will at the least lose a way of understanding our relationship with God.

This, however, will say very little to non-Christians. If they ask what is wrong with the Ethic of Intimacy, I would say simply, “There are too many losers: 600,000 babies born each year to teenagers, many of whom will spend their lives in poverty; one-and-a-half-million abortions; 12 million cases of sexually transmitted diseases (many incurable, from chlamydia to herpes to AIDS); millions upon millions of divorces; millions upon millions of children growing up with one parent; about three times as many divorced women now as in the seventies. (Divorced men remarry with women on the average ten years younger than the wives they divorced. The older women have a much smaller chance to remarry.) And on the whole, less intimacy than ever before.”

Our society regards these casualties as unavoidable. Experts stress the medical and psychological cures, the legal and economic reforms that will minimize the pain. Certainly minimizing pain is right. But the huge number of casualties is not inevitable.

What The Ethic Means To Teenagers

A critical test of any ethical system, particularly for sexuality, is how it affects the young. They are most vulnerable, for with them nothing is settled. How does the Ethic of Intimacy filter down and affect them? Personally, I have found much of the pathos of our situation in the thousands of letters from kids that I read. I have also kept up on sociological statistics about teenage sexuality. In this article, I rely primarily on statistics found in the recent study Sex and the American Teenager, by Robert Coles and Geoffrey Stokes (Harper & Row). Other studies show similar results. The Ethic of Intimacy percolates down to teenagers, and leads, in the following ways, to experiences unlikely to foster lifelong intimacy:

1. A positive view of sex within intimacy reinforces what needs no encouragement—kids’ interest in sex. Kids get the message that sex is wonderful and right when two people are intimate. They assume this includes them, since at age 13 more than half say they have been in love, and by age 17 or 18, over 80 percent believe they have experienced love.

Few teenagers are truly promiscuous, sleeping with just anyone. Two-thirds experience sex for the first time with their boyfriend or girlfriend. Once they begin they nearly always continue. Only 6 percent of the nonvirgins surveyed had gone for more than a year since last having intercourse. This means very few have one or two experiences of sexual intercourse, and then quit.

Why do they continue? Because they like it. Many of the girls experience disappointment or pain the first time, but ultimately about two-thirds of both boys and girls who have had sex report enjoying intercourse either “a great deal” or “a large amount.” Thus the Ethic of Intimacy is experienced: Intimate sex is good—at least it feels good. This is so regardless of their moral or religious viewpoint. Consider this letter I received recently:

I am 22 years old and until a month ago, I was a virgin. I admit my virginity was a frail one, one in flesh only because I’d thought about making love so much.

What bothers me is that my heart is so apathetic. I love my Lord and have witnessed his work. I know he is alive and in my heart and I believe his word, but when it comes time to go see my present boyfriend, I feel nothing holds me back. I enjoy making love to him very much.

When I come home at 2:00 A.M. from his apartment, I begin to feel remorse and know I am hurting my God. But the next day it’s gone.

Such liaisons are not loveless. About half the 15-year-old girls expect to marry their most recent sexual partners. (Boys seem more realistic: 82 percent said they did not plan to marry their partners.) By the time they turn 20, about half of all teenagers, both male and female, have had intercourse. (Other surveys show a much higher rate.)

2. The independent individual means that these kids experience a series of short relationships. Indeed, independent individuals of all ages are less likely to stick together, since they have no overarching loyalty to hold them together. This tendency, however, is far more pronounced in teenagers, because they are rapidly changing and because they move when their parents do, and because many eventually go away to college. Only 14 percent of teenagers’ sexual relationships last more than a year—about as many as last a week.

Since many start their sexual relationships in their early teens, they will run up quite a string of sexual partners in a lifetime. One need not conclude that these relationships are unimportant, or the breakups relatively painless. One staple letter I receive is from the teenager trying to get over a relationship, agonizing about it and fantasizing over it as much as two or three years later. We have no instruments to measure pain, but my impression is that these kids feel as devastated as do adults in divorce court.

3. Compatibility brings an almost frantic concern with finding “the right one.” Letter after letter comes to me asking for formulas: How do I find the right one? How do I know if I have found him? How can I tell if this is true love or merely infatuation? Kids have always had fantasies about meeting “Mr. Right,” but they daydreamed at a relatively harmless level. Today they go to bed together. They lack a future orientation toward which they dream and pine and mentally prepare. They think, like their parents, more existentially. If you happen upon the right person, you can be intimate. It is more a matter of being at the right place at the right time than a matter of choosing one sterling person to love for life. If compatibility is crucial, commitment and character decrease in importance.

4. Sex as a private matter means that kids have a tremendous amount of respect for others’ decisions. Take this letter:

A friend recently confided in me that her boyfriend and she have been sexually active for almost a year. Because we are close friends, I want to be supportive of her, but I’m not sure how right it is for me not to discourage her from making love with someone whom she says she loves. I know I have no right to control her morals. It was hard to answer when she asked me whether or not I thought it was “wrong”—because what I may consider wrong for myself may not apply to her.

A sizable minority of kids hope to stay virgins until they marry, but they usually consider this a purely idiosyncratic decision. On one hand, these kids benefit from sexual privacy: their peers might razz them a little, but usually not much. (Here I am talking about social pressures. Between a boy and a girl, alone, a good deal of pressure can be applied.) On the other hand, privacy means that kids feel very strongly that sex is their decision, and none of their parents’ or their teachers’ or their pastors’ or even their friends’ business. Society’s collective caution disappears. Sexual and romantic urges gain in significance.

5. Sex with no necessary consequences means that kids are often confounded by their own experiences when they find consequences, emotional or physical, staring at them.

Many of them experience physical consequences—pregnancy or disease. Not many 16-year-olds have thought beforehand about what it would be like to have herpes for life. Even more common are psychological consequences, among which is the fact that once they have begun participating in sex, many find they cannot stop.

I have a big problem. About four years ago I met a really nice guy who had just moved to my neighborhood. He was the first guy I really loved, and the first guy who really loved me back. We started going together about six months after he moved here. We had a very serious relationship—we were sexually active.

We broke up one year ago, and we’re still sexually active. We still care about each other a lot, but not enough to be doing this. Besides, it’s wrong.

He goes away to college this fall. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, because I couldn’t imagine never seeing him again. I still care about him a lot. He’s my best friend. I’m jealous of him and other girls he sees or dates. I feel I have a right to be.

I want to be happy, but it’s been so long since I have been! We’ve tried to stop having sex, but so far it hasn’t worked. I’ve prayed, but nothing seems to help. I don’t have anyone to talk to. I have learned a lesson, though: sex can be a very bad habit, if you start when you aren’t with the person you will be spending the rest of your life with.

When people lose their virginity, they are affected. Their view of the future changes. If they once imagined themselves sleeping only with the love of their life, they now usually must adjust to the reality that they will have many sexual partners. Poignantly, 15 percent of the girls who have begun having intercourse say they had wanted to be virgins when they married.

6. The end of the double standard means that teenagers today make no distinction between the morality of girls and boys—even though their parents often do. No doubt this is a healthy development. Nonetheless, those teenagers who become sexually active still encounter the double standard of biology. Only about half such kids use birth control, which means that somewhere between 10 percent and 40 percent of all American girls get pregnant while they are teenagers.

Most of these have abortions, and the experience is often traumatic. Those who keep their babies usually drop out of school and often end up on welfare. Though the boy often sticks with the girl through the immediate trauma, teenage relationships almost never endure beyond the crisis. Girls continue to be victims, with or without the double standard.

7. Sex requires maturity suggests that kids are not ready to experience sex—at least in their early teens. But the weakness of a situation ethic shows up: those least capable of mastering a situation ethic are often most likely to believe themselves capable. Nobody yet has managed to convince a majority of teenagers that an experience that is right for 25-year-olds is wrong for 15-year-olds. That sounds too arbitrary. Besides, it is probably in the nature of teenagerdom to believe yourself fully grown up.

Consequently, the adult consensus of 16 or younger being too young for sex has made no observable impact. At 15, over a quarter of the teenage population, both boys and girls, have had intercourse. That is to say, just as many teenagers are introduced to sex at 15 or under as are introduced to it at 16 or older.

Falling For The Ethic Of Intimacy

Any ethical framework must be judged, not by how it works with the strongest members of society, but by how it works with the most vulnerable. Those supporting the Ethic of Intimacy would like to have a double standard: one for teenagers, another for adults. This does not work.

A key reason it does not work is the vagueness of the Ethic of Intimacy. Kathryn Burkhart, in Growing Into Love: Teenagers Talk Candidly About Sex in the 1980s, gives her prescription for teenage ethics: “It seems to me that adolescents of all ages should be encouraged to have foreplay and to defer intercourse until they are extremely comfortable in their own bodies and very much at ease about themselves and their sexual partners. Teenagers should think about their own requirements for sexual intimacy and have great respect for their own feelings and values.”

The values kids should follow are “to be extremely comfortable in their own bodies,” “at ease about themselves,” aware of “their own requirements,” and “to respect their own feelings and values.” What this will tell a kid after half an hour in the back bedroom I will leave you to guess.

This does not mean civilization will collapse, but it does mean that there will be more casualties, particularly among the most vulnerable members of society.

Those who build their sexual lives around the vagueness of intimacy will be less likely to build strong marriages. To build strong marriages—a difficult thing under the best of circumstances—you must put marriage at the top of your sexual values.

I fear, though, that many Christians have almost fallen for the Ethic of Intimacy. In the face of the Playboy experiment we have put great emphasis on love, and unconsciously downplayed the institution of marriage. We have become sympathetic to divorce—not merely compassionate toward those who divorce, but sympathetic to the reasons why they do it.

We have acknowledged that marriage can be very difficult, but not said much about what benefit justifies this difficulty. We have collaborated with the emphasis on compatibility by building a theology of “the right one” whom we say God will reveal through a sense of inner peace. We have communicated to our children our horror of premarital sex (though we still, strangely, sprawl in front of the TV, where by one count six extramarital sex encounters are portrayed for every one of sex between spouses). But we have not communicated, I think, the great, saving value of marriage, an institution that demands so much of us in such clear, hard lines.

An Ethic Of Loving Monogamy

The appeal of the Old Consensus lies in its toughness, in its rigorous, invariable demand that each individual choose one person, and one only, to marry, and in its demand that each one sacrifice to create within that marriage a garden of intimacy. A pure, loving monogamy forces us to do things we would rather not. Its sternness may never be a fountain of popular songs. But we need its strength and clarity to drive the powerful, irrational force of our sexuality toward lasting intimacy.

The Ethic of Intimacy is destructive for adults as well as teenagers, and in the same ways. It simply is not strong enough to train our wild, contradictory, variable sexual and romantic impulses; it works, rather, to help us justify doing what we wish. For some—particularly the attractive, the well-off, and those in their twenties and thirties—this freedom will be pleasant. But for society as a whole, and particularly among the less attractive, the poor, the very young, or the slightly too old, it allows too many victims. And even those who seem to thrive do less well than they ought: they should be learning how to deepen love in the face of difficulties, rather than merely enjoying the freedom to “click.”

It has never been easy to communicate or maintain a belief that demands such commitment, while deferring benefits far into the future. The challenge posed for the modern church by the Ethic of Intimacy, I believe, is not only to preach to teenagers against premarital sex, but to preach to all ages the immense value of a pure and loving monogamy; and to live it so well as to make it attractive.

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