Love sex and marraige

On this most important contemporary issue, I have permission from Dr Jack Dominian, eminent British pyschiatrist, to quote extensively from his brilliant book, "God, Sex and Love", SCM Press, London. Italics mine.

1. Sexual Love

For me sexual love is a body language in which a man and a woman are talking to each other with their bodies.

First and foremost every time they make love they are saying to each other, 'You are the most important person in my life. I want you. I appreciate you, I am enjoying your presence.' It is moment which most profoundly confirms each other as persons. It is a recurrent affirmation of personhood.

When a man and a woman relate they need to sustain each other as persons. This means they need to know and to be known. At the heart of sustaining is the wish to be known, understood and responded to accurately. We do this through empathy and appropriate communication, physically and emotionally. At the centre of sustaining, is the moment of couple-communication through intercourse.

So sexual intercourse has a massive role to play in the sustaining, healing and facilitation of mutual growth. It is the one act that can constantly give life to the two people involved.

But if intercourse is to realise its potential, it needs to be carried out within the context of a continuing, reliable and predictable relationship. The full potential of sexual intercourse is to be seen as a source of life for two people who are relating over time. It is powerless to operate when it is experienced in transient, unreliable and unpredictable circumstances. The devaluation of sexual intercourse is to be found in transiency, impersonality and detachment.

The effective framework for sexual intercourse is a committed, permanent and faithful relationship and that is what marriage is. We are accustomed to think of marriage as a wedding ceremony. But marriage is essentially a committed relationship. The issue is not that sex is wrong before marriage and right after. The point is that sexual intercourse can only have justice done to its richness in a relationship we call marriage. Incidentally, the link between sexual intercourse and children is certainly biological, but infinitely more important is the contribution it makes to the stability of the spouses which gives the children the love and security which they need. Sexual intercourse is a main contributor to this stability, and this is its main significance for the life of the children. So at the heart of sexual love is the link between the physical and the personal in a committed relationship and it is against this background that premarital sexual intercourse has to be assessed.

2. Premarital Sex

Moving from the casual and before we reach the point of sexual intercourse carried out during courtship, there is a variety of sexual activity in temporary, semi-committed relationships which are not casual, nor those of cohabitation. In these relationships, young people have a temporary sexual relationship which is acknowledged to serve sexual and emotional needs of the moment, but bears no commitment for the future. At the heart of sexual intercourse is the expression of love arising from a continuous, committed relationship. In so far as these conditions do not exist, these temporary relationships are in fact denying some of the essential features of sexuality. They are offering temporary security, and sexual outlets which are valid but subordinate sexual goals. They are also problematic. One partner may become more committed than the other, and when the relationship breaks up feels very distressed, used or exploited. In fact these relationships have a semblance of exploitation in which two people agree to use one another for sexual relief and temporary commitment before they are ready for permanent relationships. For me, sex is too precious and powerful a force to be used in this way.

Couples reach a stage when they are committed to each other and are waiting to get married. What is the status of sexual intercourse in this setting? Clearly most couples feel in these circumstances that they are already married and they have sexual intercourse. It is very difficult to find moral grounds for condemning this behaviour except that in fact couples can withdraw from marrying right up to the last minute and that a public ceremony seals a commitment in as full of human way as possible. But this is an ideal, and throughout history the moment of sexual intercourse has hovered from just before to just after the ceremony.

Let me summarise. For thousands of years the key to sexuality was to be found in procreation with the accompanying pleasure, a reward for this deed. The teaching on contraception in the Roman Catholic Church which insists that every act of intercourse should be open to life is the last remnant of this tradition. No one can dismiss the biological link between intercourse and new life, but the connection has become markedly reduced, and in my view a deeper understanding of the human personality shows that is is the link between sex and love that has the supreme value and that all intercourse has ultimately to be assessed by the presence or absence of love. The link between sex and love not only makes an authentic bridge between the secular and the Christian, giving everybody a criterion of sexual integrity which they can follow, but also brings sexual intercourse to the very heart of the mystery of the Godhead.

In the First Epistle of St John we are told that God is love, and in Genesis that man and woman were created in the image of God. It is no exaggeration to say that in sexual intercourse which is linked with love, couples are reflecting the most profound experience of God in their life.

In the last twenty-five years, the permissive society has attempted to liberate sex from the confines of the furtive, the secretive, from shame and guilt. At the same time it has, at its worst, trivialised, cheapened and dehumanised it. Christianity has been shocked and its ethical foundations challenged. Crisis is a time of opportunity.

Whilst we can thank the world as Christians for demystifying sex, we have an opportunity to offer back to the world a value of sexuality steeped in love which accords with the findings of psychology, the insights of the Bible and tradition, for sex has always been held in high regard. Today we can see it as a precious gift of God which demands a morality to protect not something we should feel embarrassed about but an experience that reflects the divine in each one of us.

3. Marriage and Family: Community of Love

In the Second Vatican Council the familiar language of centuries in terms of primary and secondary ends of marriage was dropped. Instead, marriage and the family were called 'a community of love'. Marriage is now regarded as a 'conjugal covenant'. The following statement sums up the teaching: 'Hence, by that human act whereby spouses mutually bestow and accept each other, a relationship arises which by divine will and in the eyes of society too is a lasting one'. The emphasis is now on love, relationship and covenant, all integrated into a dynamic community.

We can thus see that in the last twenty-five years major changes have shifted our understanding of marriage from contract to a relationship of love. It is a shift which Christianity has accepted totally, and indeed it would be surprising if it had not, for the concept of marriage as a relationship based on love is consistent with the deepest elements of the Christian faith.

I should say at once that one of the consequences of this change has been widespread marital breakdown in Western Society. From the Christian point of view, we have the paradox that a major change in the understanding and practice of marriage as a relationship of love has led to a consequence which is entirely in disagreement with the Christian tradition of indissolubility. How is this paradox to be explained? I believe that rapidly rising expectations of women's rights, and deeper fulfilment in the personal relationship of love and sex, came with such rapidity that there was no time to prepare and support modern marriage for these ideals.

From the Christian point of view, something even more sinister has occurred. The areas where the changes are taking place such as woman's status, sexual fulfilment and the psychological understanding of intimacy are notoriously areas where Christianity is weak and has ignored, for example, a great deal of the advances of a century of psychology. For me the greatest scandal has been that a faith based on love has not been able to take the initiative to inspire people with the meaning of love in their marriage life. The failure of the church to respond creatively to the modern understanding of marriage in terms of love and sexuality is one of the major reasons for the large-scale withdrawal of people from the institutional churches which we are witnessing in so much of the Western world.

4. Sustaining, Healing, Growth

Love needs to be translated into easily recognisable categories of needs met by our partner. With this in mind, I have described three central experiences of loving in all personal relationships, but particularly in (1) sustaining, (2) healing and (3) growth.

By sustaining here I mean the level of communication, the expression of feelings of affection and the sensitive awareness of each other as a person. Women are very much better communicators than men. When it comes to expressing affection, once again women are much better at saying 'I love you' in a multitude of ways. I meet couples repeatedly where the husband says 'I told you I love you twenty-five years ago, why do you want to hear it again? I'm still here, isn't that enough?'

The sensitive awareness of each other is crucial for sustaining love. We all want to be known and understood, preferably as we were when we were children, when parents knew magically what we needed. Growing up does not remove our need for being recognised, wanted, appreciated sensitively by each other. Yet once again women are so much better at awareness than men.

One of the reasons for the widespread incidence of divorce is that women have greater expectations of these internal levels of sustaining and are not prepared to put up with instances of gross insensitivity.

We come next to (2) healing. All of us are wounded people. Physical wounds are most clearly visible; emotional ones are more ubiquitous and hidden. These wounds are created from the combined impact of our genetic make-up and our parental experiences. As a psychiatrist I have spent the last thirty years responding to the ten per cent of society who are most wounded. But all of us suffer to a greater or lesser extent from feeling of anxiety, depression, moodiness, moments of peak aggression, hostility, suspicion, mistrust, lack of confidence, lack of self-esteem, feelings of emotional deprivation, fears of being abandoned, pessimism, lack of initiative and many other negative characteristics. When we come to marriage, we long for understanding of our wounds and for a second opportunity to repair the damage. We want our spouse to heal us by giving us encouragement, reassurance, security, confidence and appreciation. The enormous preoccupation with sex in our society suggests that the only peak moment in marriage is when we are making love.

Marriage is probably the single most important source of healing in society. Once again, when the partner is too insensitive to respond to one's needs, the temptation nowadays is to look elsewhere for a more accommodating partner. I cannot leave healing without remarking that it is at the centre of our faith as we all try slowly and painfully to be Christ-like. Christianity chooses to make forgiveness its key human contribution to healing, but forgiveness with change in our personality is a sterile experience if we neither learn nor change. If forgiveness is to be effective, it need metanoia, a change of heart, and psychology has taught us more about the mechanisms of change than any other science.

The third dimension of love involves change and (3) growth. There are many who assert that as modern marriage covers a span of some fifty years, it is impossible to live with the same partner for all this time. The key to this challenge is to appreciate that we change over time. We change in our appearance, thus putting sexual attraction at risk; we change in our ideas, values and priorities, risking alienation; we change our needs, making the partner we chose at twenty irrelevant at forty. These are the risks, and the first step of prevention is to become familiar with these patterns of changes.

There are also advantages. It is an enormous benefit to be accompanied over fifty years by someone who travels by your side and both appreciates and facilitates your changes, assisting you to realise your potential, to become creative, one who supports you when you fall, helps you when you become sick, all the time understanding and appreciating each successive layer of your being which uncovers the balance between the majesty and poverty of your personality. To be accompanied by the same person is portrayed as boring, but it is infinitely more difficult to start from scratch with a new person every time you want to write another chapter of your life. Reliable continuity rather than a restless change is the key to growth. The three persons in the Trinity do not get bored with each other because their life substance is the fullness of love.

In my three key concepts of sustaining, healing and growth, I have identified some of the precursors of that fullness of love. I have no doubt there are many others and many alternative variations in describing loving. But my dream is that as the secular world of marriage and the Christian response converge on the reality of love, Christianity may seek the best of its own tradition, couple it with the best from the social sciences and begin to give men and women not only an outline of the goal of love, but the translation into concrete loving experiences which match the yearnings of people.

We have a golden opportunity to translate the notion that God is love into a practical application that will meet the secular needs of the married. At the Second Vatican Council the Roman Catholic Church coined the phrase 'the domestic church'. By this it means that married life, steeped in the love I have outlined, with its successes and its failures, is one of the most potent encounters with God. The married have their own church at home which is as powerful a meeting point with the Lord as actually going to the building of a church. For me this is an extremely fruitful idea, full of evangelisation potential. I would like to see our century be the real spiritual and theological shift whereby the home becomes as powerful a spiritual community as the fellowship of the local church.

And in case anybody thinks that the picture I have presented is too inward looking, let me say at once that a secure and loving marriage is the background from which we are most likely to go out and meet and love our neighbour. If our marriage is in distress, a good deal of our energy is taken up with survival and we have very little time for anybody else except to prop us up.

5. Marital Breakdown

That is the dream. Now we have to deal with the reality of marital breakdown and divorce. I have already presented my main thesis why there has been such a massive escalation of divorce in most Western countries since 1960. The reason is that the inner world of marriage, particularly on the part of women, has changed with the rapid rise of expectations, some of which I have outlined, with the absence of a concomitant education and support for these changes.

I am not going to blind you with statistics. Sufficient to say that there has been a 600% increase in divorce in the last twenty-five years in Britian. In 1961, there were 25,000 divorces in England and Wales and 2,000 in Scotland. In 1983 the numbers had increased to 150,000 and 13,000 respectively. In Britain as a whole, some half a million men, women and children leave the divorce courts every year. It is calculated that one in three marriages in Britain are heading for dissolution. The figure is the USA is one in two. Although divorce figures have stabilised in the last five years, the present plateau is extremely high, and I consider divorce to be the single most important social and moral issue of our day.

The consequences are massive. No one visualises the complete picture. The doctor sees the stress symptoms associated with marital conflict; the hospital the consequences in alcohol consumption, affective disorders, suicidal attempts, suicides and general disease. The teacher sees the adverse consequences on children in their behaviour at school; the clergy the immense moral dilemmas posed by divorce; the magistrate the results of juvenile delinquency; the solicitor the unhappiness and anger of frustrated spouses; and society picks up the bill of nearly two billion pounds a year as a cost of marital breakdown. I have briefly referred to the adverse effects on spouses, but recent research has highlighted how damaging divorce is for children, including the fact that divorce children have a higher chance of ending their own marriages in divorce.

I believe that the damage of divorce is immense, and that no one, including the churches, has appreciated the cost of our divorce-habituated society. Second marriages are even riskier entities than first marriages, and although some second marriages are very happy for the adults, the cost to the children is very great.

I mention all this because I want to place the ethical issues in perspective. The churches have been preoccupied with the moral dilemmas of remarriage after divorce. But for me, the major issue is divorce itself. Society and church have been concerned with picking up the pieces after divorce in such matters as remarriage in church, legislation for the needs of the divorced and the care of their children. All this is important. But the most important issue is the prevention of divorce, and about this only too little has been said and done.

Conclusion

I will finish by reasserting that we are in the midst of a major revolution in marriage which emphasises the conjugal unity as a personal relationship of egalitarian and loving proportions. Recent research such as our latest book from the Marriage Research Centre affirms that the egalitarian reality is far from complete. Women are still largely expected to work, look after the home and raise the children. But men are understanding much more. There is a paradox that the movement towards a more loving personal relationship has been accompanied by massive divorce.

I believe that the time is opportune for the churches to enter the field of marriage in a major way and make love the bridge between the secular and the Christian. Marriage has waited for a long time for a major theological and spiritual thrust, and the time is now opportune to encourage this development.

For this to happen we need a major theological revolution in which we reappraise the wedding not as the point where the church concludes its dealings with the married but rather where it begins a long journey of accompanying them over the next fifty years with support and encouragement. At the same time we need to develop a theology that makes the home, marriage and the family a central focus of the spiritual experience of its members, so that the church in the future will see the twentieth century as the beginning of a new spirituality for the lay person.

Postscript by Fr. Emmet Costello S.J.

1. Sermons Section refer to "Confused Notions of Sin."

2. Obstacles to Control.

Mainly a public opinion that glamorises sin, indulgence and weakness. It was Oscar Wilde who popularised to a dying Victorian age the idea that sin was a joy. To him a thing was delightful because it was forbidden. We are, however, almost fortunate that the brilliant prophet of the modern cult of sexual indulgence was the pathetic Oscar Wilde. His life speaks more eloquently than any argument of the appalling futility of the theories he preached. The brilliant Oscar Wilde, arguing with startling epigram that sin is a joy, that depravity and perversion are natural, that immoral black is moral white… this same Wilde is later hounded from society for practising what he preached, and then from the depths of his prison cell, writes his "De Profundis", the tortured cry of an agonised, disillusioned soul !

To control sex, one must know and think deeply about sex. Man does not play with sex - rather, sex plays with man! Dr Frank Sheed in his classical book, Society and Sanity, writes: "Upon sex we must use reason. Instinct is excellent for the lower animals but we are not lower animals but rational. And the price we pay for rationality is the reason is our only safe guide. There is no special privilege exempting sex from reason."

3. Christ, Supreme Model of Love

Over the whole human race towers the imperial figure of Christ, our Brother and Saviour. For us, as for St. Paul, Christ must be the supreme inspiration of our lives, the embodiment of all that is human, sublime, heroic, forever reminding us to imitate Him in true, unselfish love, so that we regard our bodies and others' as "temples of God". And since all genuine loving is a radical imitation of God, sex, motivated and sublimated by love, will shine forth and flourish in all its human and spiritual splendour.