Jeremiah Keenan | Maintaining monogamy

Keen on the Truth | Despite its ubiquity, separation of sex and emotional commitment is detrimental to long-term fulfillment

By Jeremiah Keenan 09/09/14 9:32pm

F or 10 years now, one of my mom’s high school friends has been in continuous, debilit ating pain. Whiplash in a minor car crash pinched a nerve, and all the surgery and opioids in Michigan couldn’t get it to stop screaming. The pain was so relentless that eventually her husband didn’t trust her to be alone in the house with rope and knives. His life became a bewildering storm, trying to raise their three children, work a full-time job and care for a full-time invalid. Sleep ceased early on; later he very nearly lost his business and, finally, his sanity.

But through it all, Mr. M carried on.

And when things got too hard for a moment to do anything else, he would just hold his wife and the two would cry together — rocking back and forth a little, perhaps, but never letting go.

The couple was in the back of my mind growing up, and they have always represented certain words for me. Words like pain, endurance, commitment, love and, later on, monogamy.

Yes, monogamy — that exclusive sexual relationship, that promise to be faithful for better or for worse, that vow to stick it out till death do us part — all sorts of things, in fact, that are considered outdated at Penn.

At Penn, two things are demanded for sexual union: mutual consent and a condom. The problem with random hook-ups is that they achieve, in one leap, a physical intimacy that we afterwards realize was based on a hormone rush or too much alcohol — not a real relationship. And you get up the next morning and wonder, what were we doing? Having a good time together? OK , good. We both agree we were having a good time. So all this meant — nothing more...?

And the funny thing is, though we might succeed in thinking this way intellectually, few can think this way emotionally — the first time. Most people require repeated sexual encounters to overcome the desire for something more. That’s why last night’s hook-ups often look so sheepish when they run into each other the next day. That’s why you can “cheat” on your boyfriend but not on your favorite substance of intoxication. The two just aren’t the same. Having sex means something more than having a good time.

But what about the importance of sleeping around before you settle down? After all, for more than two decades, it has been popular to advise extensive cohabitation before marriage. Jezebel.com — to take one example from many — states flat-out that “having [sex] before you get married, is associated with longer, more stable marriages” and advises that women experiment with a variety of men before settling down. A major rationale for this is that potential spouses, like used cars, are on the market caveat emptor. So you had better “take that car out for a test drive” to make sure it feels good. And if the baby doesn’t roll like she shines, “move along. Someone else will be happy to drive that car.”

While perhaps you don’t view your significant other as a used car, you might concede the “try-before-you-buy” argument is valid. The surprising fact is: It’s not. Try typing “premarital sex and marriage” into JStor or Google Scholar. It’s virtually uncontested that “those who cohabit prior to marriage have been shown to be significantly lower on measures of marital quality and to have a significantly higher risk of marital dissolution at any gi ven marital duration.”

Scholars stumble all over themselves suggesting reasons for this “surprising” outcome (women who try out more than one man are persnickety to begin with, traditionalists care more about preserving their marriages, intact families produce virgin brides, etc.). But to me the answer seems obvious: having sex means more than mutually consenting to have a good time. Something else has got to be there.

What?

Love, I’d say.

Real love. Committed love. The kind of love that kept Mr. M going when months stretched into years and there was no light at the end of the tunnel. The kind of love that still keeps him going as you read these words.

The kind of love that goes deeper than mutually consenting to have a good time.

Jeremiah Keenan is a College sophomore from China. His email address is jkeenan@sas.upenn.edu. "Keen on the Truth" appears every Wednesday.

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