Marriage vs. (Sexual) Relationships

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Bubba_Switzler

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I am engaged in one of those “fun” holiday debates. In this case, with a non-Christian who is an advocate for “sex-positive” culture which includes traditional marriage only as one option among many. In particular, she believes that loving non-marital sexual relationships are fine and dandy and that traditional marriage is old-fashioned.

I have been arguing for a marriage centric life on secular grounds (it would be a waste of time to put forward a religious argument) and now I need to back up my claims.

I know that there have been many good studies on how marriage is the best for health and happiness and that sex outside of marriage is damaging to the same. I encounter news articles from time to time on this, but I never kept track of the sources.

Does anyone have a handy bibliography on this topic?

This, for example, seems like a good book:

amazon.com/Case-Marriage-Married-Healthier-Financially/dp/0767906322

But what I really need is something that compares serial (sexual) relationships with abstinance before marriage.
 
I’m no expert but you might want to start with STD research. For example, biggest risk factor for HPV is number of sex partners. Condom use does not even reduce the risk. If people only had sex within the confines of marriage, this issue would reduce dramatically.
 
A “debate” is not an appropriate forum for discussing morality. Debating implies that you are open to knew arguments which may change your mind. Moral behavior, however, generally has strict guidelines not subject to reinterpretation.

Because your debate partner is going into this thinking he could win you over on this matter, he will just become frustrated when you appear to stonewall.

It would be better then to just ask if you can just share your beliefs. It will be riskier, because you are opening yourself up to ridicule, but you will have a better chance of fostering the kind of intimate conversation that leads to conversion of heart.
 
Well me being the super sinner I am :o I have had a few long term sexual relationships and for me it’s just not the same because there is no real sense of commitment to the relationship. The sense of us against the world no matter what comes our way, like my parents have is just not there when you have not taken the commitment of marriage. Which is something I have always longed for in a relationship, but if I’m not willing to take that step into marriage how can I be willing to stand hand in hand with my lover no matter what comes our way?
I have had very strong bonds with a few guys I have dated over the years, but when talk of marriage and kids came up I ran for the hills, I was in my 20’s and was still sowing my wild oats, but knowing what I know now I would have thought twice as I let 2 really super amazing guys slip though my fingers because I was not ready for more.
STD’s are another factor, but I know someone who’s husband was cheating with a few different women he met on-line and gave her an STD, how she found out he was cheating.

Most would say I’m a radical liberal on this forum, but I do believe in the sanctity of marriage so much so it sickens me to see what a mockery it has become, so I can totally understand people of a certain generation not seeing the importance of marriage and seeing it as a total sham that’s not their fault though but rather societies fault.
But with that being said I’m not a firm believer of no sex until marriage either, but I do think one needs to take the time to get to know someone on a very personal level before they do decide to take that step. One night stands wear hard on the soul years after the fact. 😦
 
Thanks for the replies and suggestions.

I am searching and found one study that was relevant:

ts-si.org/relationships/28191-delay-sex-increase-benefits

With all due respect to those who argued otherwise, I think this is the kind of material that will influence my “debate” partner. My plan is to first challenge her on the ground of her own choosing and then advance to a religious argument, the standard Jesuit tactic.
 
Bubba_Switzler said:
. My plan is to first challenge her on the ground of her own choosing and then advance to a religious argument, the standard Jesuit tactic.
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I really don’t think throwing the bible at her is going to help your case any, if anything she will just :rolleyes: at you and make her feel her point is more valid than yours.
 
She might want to consider what kind of a worship of youthful looks and a horror of old age comes from constantly having to sell oneself in order to have a sexual relationship…because you do have to “sell” yourself, or you are going to be left off of the “sex-positive” bandwagon.

Abandoning traditional marriage (which is not to be confused with most forms of contemporary marriage) in favor of that culture makes people into objects that they barter with each other for sexual, social, and yes, financial favors. In other words, relationships that don’t require any commitment beyond what one feels inclined to do as the whim hits have elements that are anything but loving. They’re mutually using, and the infection of it has spread to marriage.

So why have marriage, if a couple can make their own loving vows? Even from a purely secular standpoint, it establishes the partner as your primary family, both socially and legally. I don’t know what studies show, but when parents are committed to each other and mutually love each other as human beings, two parents who stay together to be parents for life are what children want. They don’t want a revolving door family. They want one dad and one mom for life–their mom and *their *dad. The only time that changes is when Mom and Dad don’t have the elements required for a valid marriage, and even that is a cause for great sadness with the children

That’s probably the best argument for marriage: Children want their parents to be married, and they want to be raised together with their siblings, and children are why the species has sex and affection between sexual partners in the first place.
 
Bubba_Switzler said:
I have been arguing for a marriage centric life on secular grounds (it would be a waste of time to put forward a religious argument) and now I need to back up my claims.
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We have to remember that secularism is based on a series of falsehoods and heresies. To argue our points from a secular point of view would be to assume that these falsehoods are somehow correct. We have to remember that Jesus Christ is quite literally Truth, and if we take our Blessed Lord out of our conversations all we have left is meaningless chatter!

Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with using every-day analogies to explain our points, but our debates must always be centered around helping the other person to come to see the beauty of the Catholic Church and helping their soul get to heaven. Your debate could be a golden opportunity to help save the soul this non-believer… Please don’t miss the opportunity by keeping our Blessed Lord out of this debate. 🙂

God bless!
 
Non-marriage (cohabiting) relationships are not even close marriages. There is no commitment. People lie all the time and say they’re committed, but as soon as the lease ends or someone “better” (makes more money, more attractive, etc.) comes along, they suddenly want out. I’ve overheard too many conversations of guys who say they wouldn’t marry their girlfriends even if they knocked them up (“there are too many attractive women willing to sleep with me without the commitment of marriage”). That doesn’t sound like love, that sounds like selfishness. And then couples who’ve been together for 5, 6, even 10+ years and then suddenly one of them decides to leave and the other is heartbroken because they were expecting marriage. They’re not on the same page, and there is a reason the partner(s) is holding back and not getting married.

If you love someone, take that extra step and get married. Make a public vow to stay committed until death do you part. Then if someone leaves or cheats, they are the ones who will look bad. Maybe even get a pre-nup that says cheater gets nothing. If someone leaves and they’re not even married, people will just shrug and it’ll be one of the many shack-up relationships that didn’t work out. People move in together very quickly nowadays, it is very common to breakup while living together. And then there is a huge mess because they share furniture and have to divide things up without the protection of marriage (each person being entitled to half the property in the event of a divorce).

STDs, depression, etc. are all good reasons to not sleep around. Also, the human brain (especially in females) is designed to bond the person with people they sleep with. It is not a good idea to bond with someone in such a strong way when you don’t know them very well. It clouds judgment because you think you’re “in love” and will often overlook important red flags. That is why people should wait at least a year and a half before marriage, so they can make sure the person is really right for them. Chances are, the first person you meet will not be someone meant for you to marry. And you’ll waste time with someone who isn’t right for you, which is especially bad for women because they have biological clocks. People who are promiscuous end up having “trust” issues and don’t want to marry even if they do find someone good for them; they become emotionally damaged.
 
Another good argument is the mess that results when those relationships end. I have a friend who has been with her “partner” for nearly 20 years now. While that sounds like a long-term, loving commitment, for most of those years he hasn’t worked. He also doesn’t contribute much around the house other than stacking his empty beer cans on the kitchen table (not because it’s easier for her to clean up, but because beer can pyramids rawk). She’s been gainfully employed the entire time and has entirely paid for his car (which is in his name and much nicer than her car) and their house (which is in both their names), and pays his credit card bills (both of which are in her name). It’s a great situation for him, not so much for her, and we fully expect him to leave her once she gets a little too old, or they run into some real hardships (he’s left her briefly a couple times already when he thought he’d found a greener patch of grass). When that happens, she’ll be left with his bills, her old car and, if she’s lucky, half the house.
 
Thanks, again, everyone for your generous suggestions. STDs, lack of commitment, messy breakups, all of these are great lines of argument.

While I remain convinced of the futility of throwing the Bible at her, as one poster called it, I am intrigued by this suggestion:
MidnightSun12 said:
We have to remember that secularism is based on a series of falsehoods and heresies. To argue our points from a secular point of view would be to assume that these falsehoods are somehow correct. We have to remember that Jesus Christ is quite literally Truth, and if we take our Blessed Lord out of our conversations all we have left is meaningless chatter!
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It had not occured to me to attack her secularist foundation. I have done so in other situations so I am quite familiar with the general arguments.

But I am curious if you had anything more specific here in terms of relating secularism and the “relationship” culture. I am more than a little skeptical of a round-about argument that proceeds to the relationship issue following a conversion to Catholicism. It seems to me that the opportunity here is to shake her confidence in the relationship culture, and by implication her secular views, and then use that opening to introduce the subject of religion.
Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with using every-day analogies to explain our points, but our debates must always be centered around helping the other person to come to see the beauty of the Catholic Church and helping their soul get to heaven. Your debate could be a golden opportunity to help save the soul this non-believer… Please don’t miss the opportunity by keeping our Blessed Lord out of this debate. 🙂
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Of course, ultimately that is my aim. This is hardly an academic “debate”. She is a practicing secularist.

However, I have found in arguing with secularists (in arguing generally), that one must begin with shared beliefs or else you simply end you talking past one another. Even secularists fear STDs, broken commitments, and messy breakups.
 
Bubba_Switzler said:
But I am curious if you had anything more specific here in terms of relating secularism and the “relationship” culture. I am more than a little skeptical of a round-about argument that proceeds to the relationship issue following a conversion to Catholicism. It seems to me that the opportunity here is to shake her confidence in the relationship culture, and by implication her secular views, and then use that opening to introduce the subject of religion.
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Bubba, I don’t know the details of your discussion, but my thoughts are that your debate will ultimately boil down to the following question: “Is contraception OK?”. Let me try my best to give you some points that you might be able to use. 🙂

First, I think it is very easy to demonstrate that if a couple is planning to have children, then they should first get married. A refusal to get married is a refusal to accept at least one of the vows that go along with marriage. If a man doesn’t want to marry a woman then it’s because he’s refusing to accept the vows “through sickness and in health” or “till death do us part”, etc… Why on earth would a woman even want to think about having a child with such a person? A person who refuses to get married is quite literally a person who reserves for themselves the right to leave at any point (nobody in their right mind would ever say that such an individual is ready for parenthood).

I think it is obvious from this that a couple who plans to have children should get married.

That said, I think the likley rebuttal from a secularist would be: “well they don’t have to have children”. This is where the contraception debate starts and it’s a real opportunity to highlight the beauty of Catholic teaching (as well as to show where so many protestant faiths fall short)!

With contraception, we need to show that the act of contracepting is fundamentally disordered. I would like to start with the following analogy:

The fundamental disorder behind contraception is the fact that we are separating the unitive aspect of sex from it’s proceative function. Let’s compare the act of using a condom to a person who decides that they would like to eat greasy foods without consequences. This person decides to put a plastic bag in their mouth to catch the pieces of food after they chew so that they don’t have to deal with the consequences of weight gain. After eating, the person then takes the plastic bag out and throws it away (I know this is gross, but then so is contraception if you think about it). I would then ask if this eating habit is disordered?

The obvious answer is that such an activity is seriously disordered. There is an actual eating disorder out there that is very similar to the act that I have described above (it’s called bulimia) and there is no doctor out there who would say that bulimia is not an eating disorder. In fact, the only difference between bulimia and contraception is that bulimia causes a person to have a disordered relationship with food while contraception causes a person to have a disordered relationship with their spouse.

There are stats out there showing that couples who use NFP have a 0.2% divorce rate (obviously the divorce rate for those who contracept would be pretty close to the national average which I think is around 50%):

physiciansforlife.org/content/view/193/36

One also has to ask the question: out of the 50% of contracepting couples who do remain married, how many are doing so out of love for each other vs. those who remain together in loveless marriages of convenience?

Contraception is also contrary to the whole idea of “love”. Love is the full giving of yourself to somebody else… you want to give everything you can offer to the other person. Contraception is fundamentally contrary to this idea since it is all about “holding something back”.

This is just a few ideas. I hope I was able to help! 🙂

God bless.
 
MidnightSun12 said:
Bubba, I don’t know the details of your discussion, but my thoughts are that your debate will ultimately boil down to the following question: “Is contraception OK?”. Let me try my best to give you some points that you might be able to use. 🙂

First, I think it is very easy to demonstrate that if a couple is planning to have children, then they should first get married. A refusal to get married is a refusal to accept at least one of the vows that go along with marriage. If a man doesn’t want to marry a woman then it’s because he’s refusing to accept the vows “through sickness and in health” or “till death do us part”, etc… Why on earth would a woman even want to think about having a child with such a person? A person who refuses to get married is quite literally a person who reserves for themselves the right to leave at any point (nobody in their right mind would ever say that such an individual is ready for parenthood).

I think it is obvious from this that a couple who plans to have children should get married.

That said, I think the likley rebuttal from a secularist would be: “well they don’t have to have children”. This is where the contraception debate starts and it’s a real opportunity to highlight the beauty of Catholic teaching (as well as to show where so many protestant faiths fall short)!

With contraception, we need to show that the act of contracepting is fundamentally disordered. I would like to start with the following analogy:

The fundamental disorder behind contraception is the fact that we are separating the unitive aspect of sex from it’s proceative function. Let’s compare the act of using a condom to a person who decides that they would like to eat greasy foods without consequences. This person decides to put a plastic bag in their mouth to catch the pieces of food after they chew so that they don’t have to deal with the consequences of weight gain. After eating, the person then takes the plastic bag out and throws it away (I know this is gross, but then so is contraception if you think about it). I would then ask if this eating habit is disordered?

The obvious answer is that such an activity is seriously disordered. There is an actual eating disorder out there that is very similar to the act that I have described above (it’s called bulimia) and there is no doctor out there who would say that bulimia is not an eating disorder. In fact, the only difference between bulimia and contraception is that bulimia causes a person to have a disordered relationship with food while contraception causes a person to have a disordered relationship with their spouse.

There are stats out there showing that couples who use NFP have a 0.2% divorce rate (obviously the divorce rate for those who contracept would be pretty close to the national average which I think is around 50%):

physiciansforlife.org/content/view/193/36

One also has to ask the question: out of the 50% of contracepting couples who do remain married, how many are doing so out of love for each other vs. those who remain together in loveless marriages of convenience?

Contraception is also contrary to the whole idea of “love”. Love is the full giving of yourself to somebody else… you want to give everything you can offer to the other person. Contraception is fundamentally contrary to this idea since it is all about “holding something back”.
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These ideas are very helpful but, alas, I think you understimate the disorder. We are not talking here about a couple planning to have children or even a couple planning to get married. We are talking about a couple that is, at best, temporarily monogomous, at least until they fall out of “love”. Marriage is “just one option” and children a very distant possibility. (Fortunately my “debating” partner is not participating in the hookup culture but that is only a step away.)

Teaching a deeper meaning of love is certainly a potential avenue but what I find is that people are perfectly willing to have less in the short term or to rationalize that they have it all in the moment of infatuation. Sexual relationships become and end in and of themselves. Contraceptives are merely a means to that end. It wouldn’t make much sense to suggest dropping contraceptives out and leaving things otherwise the same.
 
The only real reason is that sex outside of marriage is a grave sin. Everything else are just godless excuses.
 
Bubba_Switzler said:
These ideas are very helpful but, alas, I think you understimate the disorder. We are not talking here about a couple planning to have children or even a couple planning to get married. We are talking about a couple that is, at best, temporarily monogomous, at least until they fall out of “love”. Marriage is “just one option” and children a very distant possibility. (Fortunately my “debating” partner is not participating in the hookup culture but that is only a step away.)

Teaching a deeper meaning of love is certainly a potential avenue but what I find is that people are perfectly willing to have less in the short term or to rationalize that they have it all in the moment of infatuation. Sexual relationships become and end in and of themselves. Contraceptives are merely a means to that end. It wouldn’t make much sense to suggest dropping contraceptives out and leaving things otherwise the same.
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You certainly know the nature of the debate better then me, but I think contraception is the foundation that makes the entire “sexual revolution” possible. If you can successfully attack the morality of contraception then the entire house of cards will come tumbling down on top.

The problem I find with exposing liberalism is that it goes to great lengths to hide the ugly nature of sin behind vague concepts. Ie. Two men sodomizing each other is called “love”, a woman murdering her unborn child is called “reproductive rights”, etc… I think you have to expose the sin that lies underneath. In the case of your conversation, I think there are two sins at play here: the sin of pre-marital sex which is enabled by the sin of contraception. I think the key is to expose and attack these rather then taking on the “vague concepts” that will be used to justify the lifestyle.

God bless! 🙂
 
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