Let’s Talk About [Marital] Sex, Baby! Marriage, Sex, and Perspective
One of the demarcations of becoming a Christian adult is the way in which one day, sometimes all of a sudden, sex becomes a frequent part of conversations among friends. Here, I’m not referring to youth group purity talks, nor the way teenagers pretend to know what they’re talking about when talking about sex amongst themselves; no, I’m referring to that moment in which a taboo is lifted, your eyes are cleared, and, well, everyone around you just seems to want to talk about sex.
Perhaps it’s just that people grow tired of the pretense so many of us in the church have about our sexual lives. The reality is that many evangelical young people do indeed have sex—inside and out of marriage. Whereas evangelical millennials in one decade-old study were more likely to say that sex outside of marriage is wrong than previous generations, 69% of unmarried participants in the same study admitted to having sex with at least one partner in the last 12 months (and yes, the hilarity of that figure is not lost on me). Since then, those millennials have all grown up, weathered the realities of life and relationships, seen friends get married young and sometimes end in divorce, and lived in a culture which can only imagine abstinence as repression.
Yet my partner and I—only recently married this last summer—experienced a particularly unusual manifestation of this phenomenon. Within the days and weeks that followed our wedding day (yes, even on our honeymoon), friends old and new began to open up far more freely and honestly about their sex lives with us. I went from having approximately zero conversations about sex with both my Christian and non-Christian friends to feeling like I had one all the time. Christian friends felt free to both share and inquire because they now knew that we had without-a-doubt slept together, and non-Christians because they were interested as to why it had taken this long to sleep together!
I grew up in a context in which, if the topic was broached at all, premarital sex seemed to be the only concern. I’m since learning that sex after marriage is an equally messy business; messy not in the sense of bad, but in the sense of complicated; often without clear guidelines, expectations, or scripts.
“Despite the insistence from purity culture that ‘sex is beautiful but only in a (hetero) marriage,’ it is clear that many of us do not actually feel this is the case.”
Part of what I think both of us realised, especially after our (fun, though not particularly pleasurable!) first time, is that there is a sense in which we all need to relax a little bit when talking about sex. Sex is great, but it’s certainly not everything. In fact, I think there are equally intimate, if not more intimate, parts of a romantic relationship than intercourse itself—an act often held up in youth group as the most intimate, intense, and private experience of one’s life.
Demystifying sex itself as an act between two married people also helps us make sense of some of the ways the scriptures seem to broach the topic. In his excellent essay “Forbidden Fruit: Sexuality and Spirituality in Perspective,” former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams compellingly argues that in the grand scheme of the New Testament’s ethics, sex as it relates to marital intimacy ranks pretty low on the priorities of the church community. Further, Williams argues that what we often mean as modern people by ‘sexuality’ as a category is unfamiliar to the Greco-Roman context in which much of the New Testament was written.* This is not to say that sex and marriage isn’t important, rather, sex is not the biggest concern of those compelled to new life in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Greed and economic disparity within the church, to name but one example, both feature far higher in both the teachings of Jesus and the epistles written to the early church. And indeed, what the New Testament does say about sex (again, a potentially unhelpful modern category to read onto pre-modern texts) is often complex and category-defying. When St Paul addresses sexual promiscuity in the Corinthian church, for example, his concern is often that such actions effect the wider body, that private actions have public consequences—a far cry from the sexual ethics of purity culture which seek to cover-up, privatise, and individualise our bodies and what we do with them (e.g., 1 Corinthians 6:15-19).
To say, however, that ‘sex isn’t actually a big deal after all’ is perhaps to undermine or trivalise the way in which sex, bodies, and sexual intimacy are tied with profound feeling of shame and spiritual torment. While we’ve shared brave stories about these experiences on Metanoia from various perspectives, I can only share mine.
Personally speaking, I found that ideas I was implicitly and explicitly taught—that men want sex and women simply tolerate it—really affected the way I thought about my relationships and my body. Combined with a decent amount of teenage guilt from pornography, expressing sexual desire freely and openly with my now-wife was and can still be a real challenge. There’s a lot of important and prescient commentary about the way purity culture denigrates female bodies and desire. But the logics of this way of thinking about sex also affect men’s own perceptions of themselves as sexual beings, often tied up with feelings of shame and unfamilarity attached to their own bodies.
Despite the insistence from purity culture that ‘sex is beautiful but only in a (hetero) marriage,’ it is clear that many of us do not actually feel this is the case. The fact that people felt ‘safe’ to talk to us about sex only after one could be sure we had actually ‘done the deed’ indicates that virginity is still seen as a morally superior state of being—at least at the level of gut beliefs we hold about ourselves and our bodies. Put simply, people felt like they had to wait till we were ‘on the same level’ of having had sex before it was open and safe to share in mutual struggles and feelings of shame.
I recall the story of one pastor (who shared this story in a public forum). In the first year of marriage, sex for himself and his partner was comfortable, open, and enjoyable. However, as time went on, he began to feel shame and even paranoia about his sexual life. Growing up as a pastor’s kid under the watchful eye of a congregation, he realised that the anxiety he developed came from a worry that because he was now sexually active, people would find out and this would reflect badly on his family. Sex, even within the sanctioned confines of marriage, felt wrong and dirty—an action which could only expose one’s true depravity.
Where does this all leave us? Is this to say that the sexual revolution was right and we should freely (and gleefully) throw off all traditional Christian sexual practice? (Spoiler alert: I’m not sure the modern sexual imagination in the West has sex all figured out either.)
The reality is that whatever comes after purity culture requires more than what I can offer right now. The first step, however, may simply be to talk about it. Embrace the fact sex is a messy, never-neat part of life. The lines between right and wrong, pure and corrupt, good and bad are difficult to discern, and I think, in the end, the wrong way to think about sex anyway. With trusted friends or mentors, dare to broach the topic and I suspect you will find that many of us carry around deep burdens. Together, I believe we can share such burdens and find a better way to live as human creatures desiring more faithfully after one another and after God.
Oh, and you don’t have to wait for marriage to do that.
~
Andrew Clark-Howard is currently editor at Metanoia.
* Sex, marriage, and monogamy in the first century Roman Empire looked very different from the social and sexual understandings of these topics in modern western societies today. For example, marriage itself was tied far more to social standing and procreation—not intimacy or romance. To this end, sex outside of one’s marriage, for men at least, was widespread and morally acceptable, whether that was sex in brothels, external affairs, with slaves, or with older men and patrons. Furthermore, the delineation between public and private life was different from how we think about it today. Whereas we often understand romance, marriage, and sex to belong to the inner, individualised private world, public life and standing was understood differently by Greco-Roman society. It is within this context into which many of Paul’s letters especially were written.