Out of Crisis and Into Happiness, Or Happy Marriage, Happy Sex

Acton's Jennifer Roback Morse was interviewed recently by ZENIT on how the cure for many social ills lies in authentic sexuality. Here's a truffle passage as to why marriage is in crisis:

The marriage crisis is really a sex crisis. The modern world completely misunderstands the meaning of human sexuality. In spite of all our sex education and overtly sexual entertainment, we don't really understand what sex is all about.

We have the idea that sex is a private recreational activity, with no moral or social significance. If that's true, our sex partner becomes a commodity that may or may not please us. And in a consumer society, when we are no longer satisfied with a product, we get rid of it. I call this Consumer Sex.

The basic problem with Consumer Sex is that no one wants to be treated like an object. No matter how much we enjoy our casual sex while we're doing it, the truth is that no one, male or female, wants to be on the receiving end of being discarded. All the problems and disappointments that people experience in their college coed dorms and in dating can be traced to this one point.

We have created a culture in which it is socially acceptable to use people. The implicit agreement is this: You can use me as a sex object, if you allow me to use you. Instead of mutual love, we think sex is about mutual using.

This is why marriage is in crisis: We know that marriage needs sex, but we don't see that sex needs marriage. We realize that sex is necessary to a good marriage, but we don't seem to grasp the connection between marriage and having good sex.

And another on the key to a good marriage:

One of our problems is that we don't really understand love. We think that love means, "I like the way I feel when I'm with you." But every adult knows that feelings change far too much to form the basis of a lifelong marriage.

The Thomistic definition of love is "to will and to do the good of another." This formulation accents the fact that love is a decision. We can make a decision to do the good of the other person, even if we don't feel like it.

John Paul's emphasis on self-donation helps to highlight this deeper and more sustainable understanding of love. I describe it as "self-giving, rightly understood," as an analogy with Alexis de Tocqueville's famous description of Americans as embracing "self-interest, rightly understood."

Self-giving is an act of self-valuing because it presupposes that the person is valuable enough to be considered a gift.

Self-giving is inherently more social than self-interest, even rightly understood. Self-interest, rightly understood, has an element of reciprocity to it, but the reciprocity is added after the fact. We are taught to say, "I am valuable. Oh, by the way, so is everybody else."

With self-giving, there is no "by the way" about it. Giving presupposes a gift, a giver and a recipient. Community is at the center of the self-giving way of life.

The practical importance of this point is that our personal philosophy directs us to cultivate some attitudes and avoid others. Self-interest tells us to ask, "What's in it for me?" Self-giving tells us to ask, "How can I help?"

The self-giving philosophy of life has a far higher likelihood of producing a happy marriage.