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WINTER: Separating sex from marriage

By Mary Winter, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 15, 2008 at 3 p.m.

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One of the few positive things about life after 50 is that sex loses some of its stranglehold. You become much more rational about the topic.

You can look at situations like John Edwards' extramarital affair and rise above your first impulse, which is to secretly line his crotch and inseams with flesh-eating bacteria.

Your equanimity comes from your advancing years, which have diminished your sex hormones, thickened your skin, exposed your own sins and reordered your priorities.

After 50, sex takes a back seat to all the other things you're losing, like collagen, hearing and memory.

But the silver lining is that for the first time since puberty, you're able to put sex in proper perspective.

You can step back and see the big nasty for what it is: an urge, a fever, a biological impulse over which many unfortunate people and their loved ones have no control.

John Edwards - like Eliot Spitzer, Ted Haggard and Bill Clinton before him - are cut from the same philandering cloth.

Some might even compare them to alcoholics, incapable of helping themselves.

This past spring, after Spitzer was busted for sex with a call girl half his age, New York magazine ran a cover story on the "Secret Lives of Married Men."

"What was Eliot Spitzer thinking? A lot of husbands know exactly what he was thinking," read the headline and intro.

In the article, author Philip Weiss argued humans are hard-wired to crave sexual variety and that they suffer greatly under the yoke of strict monogamy.

Weiss quotes author Susan Squire, who is writing a book on the history of marriage.

Squire tells Weiss marriage "wasn't meant to handle all the sexual pressure we're putting on it."

For one thing, we're all living so much longer now that having only one mate is statistically a lot more unrealistic than it once was.

Furthermore, 100 years ago, marriage was a formal arrangement focused on breeding and survival, says Squire. Today, standards of morality have changed dramatically.

According to Squire's research, prostitution was far more open and available in the Victorian era than it is today.

"America is a special case. By the early 20th century ... the combined impact of egalitarian ideals and the movies had burdened American marriage with a new responsibility: providing romantic love forever."

Squire would argue that a long and supportive marriage should be prized above a sexually faithful one.

She put it to Weiss this way:

"Why does society consider it more moral for you to break up a marriage, go through a divorce, disrupt your children's lives maybe forever," just to be able to sleep with someone with whom sex is going to get just as boring before long as it was with the first person?

It's a fair question.

She hits the nail on the head when she says we're nuts to keep perpetuating the fairy tale that romantic love is supposed to last forever.

We're just torturing ourselves.

People's bodies wear out and sag. Passion fades. If we're wise, or lucky, we get a partner we love for the long haul, for reasons having nothing to do with sex.

The challenge is figuring out how to demystify sex long before you get so old it happens by itself.

If only we could approach love and sex less like a package deal and more like separate and unrelated acts - driven by nature rather than affection - I think we'd save ourselves a world of heartache.

But it takes an old pro to see it. The fog of youth obscures many truths.

mwinte@aol.com

Comments

  • August 15, 2008

    6:32 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    MC2008 writes:

    Monogamy is a social disease. Great article.

  • August 16, 2008

    8:39 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    RS writes:

    Two factors have already separated sex from marriage. The first are massive changes in the law - unilateral, no-fault divorce and the ability of a wife to charge a husband with rape, including penalties identical to the worst, most violent, stranger rape. The second change is DNA paternity testing providing men with the oportunity to learn if their children are their children. Those changes have eliminated, legally, the ties between marriage and sex. Unfortunately, with the elimination of sex, romance is not far behind and this means marriage, as confirmed by our legal system, is all about money and property. As people learn it is ONLY about money and property - not even children - they will naturally avoid it with the obvious exception of those who can profit from marriage in terms of money and property. Women beautiful enough to cause a man to suffer hormonal stupidity will continue to enjoy marriage, probably in a serial fashion, with a resulting accumulation of wealth. See the movie "Intolerable Cruelty" for a clear demonstration of the current "morality" of marriage.

  • August 16, 2008

    2:23 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    BRL writes:

    Obviously, the writer of this column has either:
    1. Never been the recipient of an unfaithful spouse
    2. Had an affair herself.
    It's pretty easy to just say that monogamy is unnatural and unachievable, especially if you're weak, immature and have the impulse control of a two-year old.

  • August 16, 2008

    8:36 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    me2 writes:

    monogamy would produce less fit children, if it really were practiced all the time.

    Mom nature wants us to mate early, often, and with a variety of different partners to produce the best gene pool.

    Marriage is a social institution that we created and we can change, as we do, any time we like.

    People are now getting married to share insurance benefits. They may not even live together, but share a home with someone else.

  • August 17, 2008

    6:10 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    Miss_Sin_Link writes:

    Well, lah-dee-dah, BRL. How wonderful it must be living such a holy and temptation-free life. I wish we were all such advanced life forms as you.

  • August 18, 2008

    8:56 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    Who_Me writes:

    Try swinging. You find out how to uncouple sex and love/marriage.