I’ve been thinking about a matter related to Hugo’s discussion of sexual matters with his youth group. I feel I’m no help in regards to the central issue, since I didn’t really understand teenagers even when I was one, so I can’t offer advice on how to talk to them. But this bit caught my attention:

I wonder: if I could have the “best” for them, the complete and utter best, if I could have them “hit the mark” directly, would I want them to wait to become sexually active until they were older? Yes, I would. Would I want them to wait until marriage? In all honesty, I’m not sure. Despite the fact that I have dear friends of mine today who did “wait” for marriage, my own background and life experience still tells me that for most people, that’s an impossibly lofty goal that isn’t even worth shooting for. I wonder if my theology of sex isn’t being informed by my own sense of frailty.

This is a kind of funny line coming from a pacifist, because that’s exactly how a lot of people would look at pacifism. Ideally it’s great, but it doesn’t have much to do with the real world, does it? Yet in the circles that Hugo and I run in (well, maybe I don’t right now, but historically speaking) pacifism is, if not the majority position, at least a respectable one, while opposing premarital sex is just kind of ridiculous. I remember in the movie The Brothers McMullen, the “good” brother — the straight-arrow, moral censorious, devoutly Catholic one — still had sex with his girlfriend (using a condom), since everyone knew that that Church teaching is too out-there to be taken seriously.

Premarital sex has always been with us, of course. According to Daniel Pool, in 1800 about a third of brides were pregnant on their wedding day. And, at various times in the past, prostitution has been a much bigger business than it is now. But what’s definitely new is the way premarital sex has become a ritualized part of courtship. A Washington Monthly article explains:

…there is currently only one broadly accepted rule of courtship: The Third Date is The Date (unless, of course, you’re a glued-together-at-the-knees Rules girl.) If either party declines sex on the Third Date, it’s a clear sign that the relationship is going nowhere. And if the Third Date culminates in sex, they’re officially a couple–or at least, the guy’s a real loser if he doesn’t ask the girl out again afterwards. (Sex before the Third Date is a signal that a) you believe in love at first sight; b) you’re a promiscuous floozy; or c) you think a, he thinks b.)

And if your coupledom is successful, you’ll move in together. And if that’s successful, then you think about getting married. I think it’s because people can’t imagine arriving at marriage any other way that the premarital-sex ban seems so weird.

The WM author takes a “conservative” position by asserting that people ought to take more time to get to know each other before having sex. But when I look at how people used to do things before premarital sex was normal, it wasn’t that the sex was slower but that the courtship was faster. While characters in Jane Austen novels don’t “date” per se, it seems like about the point in the relationship where a modern couple would have sex is the point where the Regency man would propose marriage. Which is by extension a proposal for sex, of course, but also for a lot more than that.

It’s tempting to think that the sex proposal was the important part, and only because the premarital-sex ban was in place were people in such a hurry to get hitched. But I’ve been wondering if it actually worked the other way around. I suspect, though I’d have to do more research on it, that courtship started lengthening before premarital sex became acceptable. In the 1954 movie Rear Window (gee, for a non-movie person I have a lot of movie references here), the middle-aged nurse wonders why the hero is dithering about marrying his girlfriend. She says something like, “In my day, two people looked at each other, they got excited, they got married. Now people do all this thinking and reasoning.” Nor does life in a modern society with freely available birth control seem to guarantee long courtships. James Ault reported that marriages in his 20th-century Massachusetts community also tended to be abrupt, even though most people he knew got married before converting.

Why the difference? Ault ties this to the separateness of the male and female spheres in that community. Men and women don’t expect to have much in common or form deep mental bonds, so “look at each other and get excited” is the main qualification for marriage. That’s surely a factor, but I think there are others.

For one thing, in close-knit communities like Austen’s and Ault’s, strangers are not really that strange. In modern urban life we tend to think of a person’s “true self” as abiding deep within his heart, so only by knowing him intimately do you really know him. But that assumption may be born of the fact that our public lives are largely anonymous and changeable. In a rural society, you can gather a lot of important information about a person through his reputation, family, financial situation, and social standing. Moreover, you’d expect those things to be stable throughout a person’s life. To pull another example from Austen, one part of Elizabeth’s falling in love with Darcy is seeing his estate (and hearing his housekeeper talk glowingly about him). It seems rather mercenary, and I suppose it is, but a man’s house was also a much bigger part of his identity in that society. It was his inheritance and responsibility, and Elizabeth would expect him (and herself) to remain there for the rest of his life. Nowadays you wouldn’t expect such stability; in fact, one reason for long courtships may well be the need to find out how the other person deals with change.

There are also a lot of things that a modern couple needs to find out if they have in common that, for premodern couples, were culturally determined. Matters like values and philosophy, who does what within the household, and how to raise the kids were largely settled before the courtship even started. People still disagreed about these things to some extent, but marriage generally seemed to be more a matter of fitting tab A into slot B than building something entirely from scratch.

Last but not least, in a society like that a person wouldn’t meet a lot of other people, and even fewer who were marriageable. People didn’t seem to spend a lot of time worrying if someone better will come along, and for good reason. I gather one reason for the lengthy modern courtship is that people want to give the hypothetical better person an adequate amount of time to show up, and to see if generally meeting other people while being attached to your mate is going to be peaceful or frustrating. It’s been noted by others that this itchy “something better is out there” feeling is a hallmark of capitalist society, because the market relies on it to keep selling people new products. I don’t know how much of the phenomenon I’m talking about is due to that and how much is due to the greater number of people one meets, but it may well be a factor.

So is there anything modern people can learn from all this? I do think it’s sensible for people today to want to know each other well before marriage, since we can’t rely on the same external clues that premodern folk did. I do think, though, that it might behoove us to pay a bit more attention to those external clues that exist. When I think about my past boyfriends, actually their families did indicate a lot about them, more than I wanted to admit really. Part of the myth of romance is the idea that when two hearts meet, those externalities and practical details don’t really matter. But given the number of couples who break up over them, I think they do!

Of course, the question that started all this was: does the knowledge people need to acquire about each other before marriage have to include sex? Certainly a lot of people feel they need to know if they’re sexually “compatible.” Something makes me uncomfortable about this idea of auditioning people in bed — as Lynn put it in a previous discussion of this, should I run a credit check on him while I’m at it? But more to the point, I agree with Lynn that people are too confident about the infallibility of birth control, and their infallibility in using it. It does not seem at all crazy to me to reserve the procreative act for situations where, even if you don’t actually want to get pregnant, getting pregnant is not an unthinkable disaster. And for those who are opposed to abortion, as Hugo is, that goes double. For most people, that situation would be marriage. (There do seem to be some subcultures where single motherhood is so ingrained that girls more or less expect to raise children in elephant-like matrilineal clans; but that’s a more complicated problem, and I doubt it includes Hugo’s teens.) One point I think Lynn really nails in this post is how pregnancy is a different sort of risk than STDs, where the risk is fairly straightforward injury to yourself. Pregnancy instead sets off a chain of consequences and further decisions, affecting a number of people and, indeed, future generations. So while it may be acceptable for me to just block out of my mind the fact that I can get killed whenever I climb into my car, I don’t think this is a good way of dealing with the risks of sex.

I don’t think, however, that the extreme circumspection about sex that we see in Austen novels is a good idea in the modern world. People need to think about it and talk about it. Which, I guess, is obvious, given the length of this post!