Making Nobody Happy

Humans are quite complex creatures, and possess an enormous reservoir of complexity that is otherwise unmatched in known existence. Our brains exceed in functional complexity any system or creation you can find in the works of man and nature. Our ability to adapt to almost any environment, challenge, and situation is unparalelled, and the speed with which we can adapt beyond all biological compare. The complexity of our social orders and structures, as well as our technological achievements, are without parallel in known existence.

So, having made the pitch that humans are, all things considered, pretty complicated and multi-dimensional things, and considering the kind of challenges we face in navigating such a complex existence, as well as the enormous problem of how to manage the task of producing and raising more of these complicated little creatures, it makes sense that some sort of elevated concept of the relationship between the sexes should be called for.

It takes two to tango. That is the most basic building block of our species and subsequent societies. Everything is built on this one necessary foundation. That it takes both halves of the human genome, the female lineage and the male lineage, both halves of humanity, to successfully bring a new life into existence. But that’s just the first step. Our needs, hopes, desires, strengths, and challenges all come into play. Marriage is, I suppose, a logical extension of the basic physical act of coming together to create a new life across the various other dimensions of human existence (financial, psychological, social, historical, familial, legal, and so on). And it serves to extend that relationship across time, creating a stability within that unity that allows humans to navigate the difficulties of the various stages of human life from childhood to youth to adulthood to parenthood to old age, all of which used to follow in much quicker succession for most of human history.

So what is it that is of the essence in this most basic of human partnerships, this arrangement that forms the foundation of our most basic and widespread form of social organization and negotiation and mutual agreement? What is it about it that has empowered us to stake so much on it and survive and accomplish so much because of it? What is the utility in it that makes us willing to pay the price it demands? Even more fundamentally, what is the price that it demands?

Marriage, like humanity, and the dimensions of our lives it extends across, cannot be easily boiled down to a single simple value or purpose it serves any more than you could. Asking what its purpose is is like asking what the point of being is. It’s a very good question, but not one that can easily be answered in a pithy statement. Because the answer is everywhere and nowhere, and is written across the lives of every human that has ever strived and loved and lived. The invitation of the question is greater than the ability of the given medium to contain it.

Marriage is, essentially, a kind of partnership. In fact it’s almost a kind of voluntary slavery. It’s a covenant, in the oldest sense of the term. It’s an attempt to put together two of the most unusual and complex kinds of things in the world that can be biologically distinguished, human men and women, and unite them in a way that extends across all possible axes of their being. It is a symbolic, physical, genetic, familial, financial, emotional, psychological, intellectual, legal, social, practical, and literal unity. Two become one: one unified species, one physical body, one social unit, one new generation of children. The past unites in the present and gives rise to the future. It’s little wonder that the dramatization of it was written in the romances the gods and the shaping of the world itself.

So, considering that in examining the subject of marriage we are not examining merely some arbitrary social convention or question of wedding favors, but a mode of being that has had a profound influence on the history of humankind, what exactly interests me about it and provokes my curiosity? And the answer, since you’ve been so kind to ask, is this. If marriage is a kind of partnership or covenant, a mutual binding and negotiation between the sexes, a sort of treaty or exchange (and don’t we exchange vows?), what exactly are the terms? To put it more specifically, what is each party agreeing to give up and what are they expecting to receive in return?

I think the short answer, in a word, is fidelity. Now, fidelity can mean lots of things. I’m it’s most basic essence, I think the meaning of fidelity could be expressed as the commitment to commit both the contributions and the needs of both partners to the greater purpose of the unified identity. In other words, my needs aren’t for me, now, they’re for us. The idea of us, the relationship, spread across time and all the different dimensions of our lives. My needs are our needs. My contributions, what I have to give, also aren’t just mine any more. They’re ours. And the two are there to reinforce one another. I share your needs and help you meet them, and you share my contributions and help me make them.

Since exploring every possible dimension of fidelity would take some serious time, for now I want to hone in on a single specific example, the most obvious example of fidelity between the sexes. Sexuality. What is the proper way to concieve of sexual fidelity? What, exactly, are we promising one another? What are we expecting to receive? What, if anything, do the sexes owe one another in this area?

Among the sexes, both long term partners have similar concerns of fidelity, but may view them with a special emphasis that reflects both their own specific needs and their specific claims on their partner. For women, the primary claim is to exclusivity. For men, the primary claim is to availability. And the two are complimentary and support one another. Both of them ask the other to give up something that might be difficult for them and to devote those resources that might otherwise be spent or conserved elsewhere, and to agree to share them with one another for the benefit of the relationship, the meeting of mutual needs, and the security of the relational investment.

For both partners, fidelity essentially comes down to, you belong to your spouse, that part of you is for them. And essentially it’s the same, equal claim. But since men and women differ broadly on average in what that means for them, what exactly in themselves they will be overcoming to make a fair exchange between them, varies.

Men have a strong urge to spend their sexual investment, to spread their interest and energy and excitement and pursuit around. And the marriage bond confines that energy and says, fine, spend it, pursue it, but pursue it here, and only here. Your intense physical need keeps driving you on and back, and you’re going to let it only drive you back to this place. You’re going to deliberately invest all that interest and energy exclusively in one person. And in return you get some security that that need and desire will find a proper object and fulfillment and will be rewarded for making such an exclusive commitment to this single source.

The power of that investment to direct and make useful the male sexual drive can’t be underestimated. And from a male’s perspective, it’s a pretty big thing to give up. Male sexual desire is extremely intense, distracting, motivating, persistent (for an immensely long part of their lives), viable (again, for a very long part of their lives), erratic, instinctual, and deeply tied to male emotional states and sense of value. The desire and need in men is so built in and is so easy to engage with minimal stimulation (simply seeing a naked woman or being asked if they would like to have sex has been shown to be all it takes to get a huge portion of men on board with the prospect of having sex, an experiment that produced quite opposite results with women), that an otherwise reasonable and stable man can be quite easily induced to throw away years of work and devotion to a job, relationship, or reputation for mere chance of some moments of temporary pleasure. We’re not even talking about the possibility of a new, stable relationship, just the prospect of a chance to couple a single time with a lovely young woman has been all it takes to get a wealthy man to surrender his wealth, a devoted man to betray his principles, a respected man to wreck his reputation, all of which are constructions that took him years to build.

Men, of course, likely wouldn’t have chosen to be born such idiots if they had been given the choice in some theoretical neutral state of undifferentiated humanity. It’s obvious how much such a vulnerability costs them, what a weakness it is, what a liability. But the idea that people wouldn’t be a certain way if it was to their disadvantage to be so is absurd on every level of actual experience. And there is no mythical undifferentiated state of humanity. We are ourselves.

What we are is part of the precondition of who we are. But who we become after coming to terms with those preconditions is part of our own individual and moral agency and responsibility. We are not and cannot be completely unlimited in our choices of what we can be because we cannot choose the preconditions of what we are.

All human constructions are limited at least by the nature of the matter we must use to build them, as well as the physical forces that govern them. Over these, we have little power, except understanding, because we cannot make ourselves or make the world or the things we wish to make the world out of. But within the constraints of even matter and physics, there is room for almost infinite variety and freedom and accomplishment.

And its the same way with the human constitution. We cannot help but be what we are. Physical things that need food and air and water, that have a definite biological and psychological structure, beings that must propagate in a certain way, that have certain strengths and certain weaknesses and certain needs and certain fears. Whatever sort of men we are to become, we must build it from the materials available. And in this case, men are (among many other things) sexually agressive, easily visually stimulated, needy for approval and validation, and easily overwhelmed by their desires into counterproductive actions that endanger their own long term wellbeing. Fine.

But outlining how the fundamental character of men can easily and does easily go wrong doesn’t exclude the possibility of those same qualities being used well. The possibility those same underlying qualities being devoted to and subsumed into a higher (more extended across time and across multiple areas of life) value.

So the dilemma isn’t between manhood and some purer, better state of humanity from which manhood is excised. It’s a dilemma between toxic manhood, manhood used badly, and optimal manhood, manhood that is still itself and perhaps even more itself by becoming fully integrated and finding its use and purpose in a way that also serves the highest conception of the good of the man across time and multiple dimensions of life.

I think it was worth taking time to delve into this issue in order to avoid a couple false solutions to the problem of being a member of a sex. First, the idea that the problem can be solved by removing sex itself. Simply from a species survival standpoint, this is a terrible idea, and psychologically quite unworkable, and does terrific violence to fundamental and beautiful aspects of the human creature. Sex is older, biologically, than complex life. It’s a wondrous miracle that exists for the good of our species and is responsible for our survival and success.

You might not enjoy the sunburns the sun’s light causes, but sustaining life without the fundamental engine of its continuation is a losing prospect and would produce untold suffering. It’s power may be dangerous, but the question is, dangerous compared to what? What other pattern and power for life, what other mode of being have we found anywhere else in the universe? It’s a power we have to learn to live with, not live without. And rejecting it is akin to a rejection of life as such, of being as such. So let us avoid any solution that won’t let humans be humans and tries to deal with us as some theoretical ideal invention rather than the actual things we are. Avoiding the truth about ourselves won’t help us navigate our lives or find solutions to our real problems.

And the second idea I wished to dispose of was the temptation to resignation, excessive pessimism and determinism, in contrast to the unrealistic optimism and idealism of the first false solution. This solution admits that there is something that we are, some fixed material we have to work with, but absolves itself of further responsibility by denying that there’s anything we can do in choosing how to use or shape those given materials. Boys will be boys, and there’s nothing we can about it.

Men are pigs. There is no agency, no choice, no responsibility, no secondary level of determination that our awareness of ourselves, the complexities of life, its demands, its possibilities, and our own capabilities and possibilities opens up to us. We are only animals, only instinctive, not volitional, bound completely by the materials we are given. The existence of fixed biological realities or tendencies, materials we must work with, precludes personal or moral criticism or agency with regard to them.

The reality, of course, as is obviously apparent in how every sensible person acts in the world (we all act, in practice, as if the world consisted of many fixed elements and conditions we have to work with but which we have opportunity and freedom to make choices and achieve goals within). The reality is a balance between the two, with the solutions of neither extreme offering us the sort of total freedom nor total determination that it would be comforting to slip into. We find ourselves caught between God and worm, unable to lay claim to the peace of either, and instead must negotiate our way through a much more difficult middle space.

So, back to the main topic. We’ve explored what exactly it is that men are negotiating to give up when they enter a long term stable relationship like marriage. It’s not a small sacrifice, it’s not just something they will naturally fall into without effort. It’s a choice of how to use and structure their being for a higher purpose. And there are many rewards to be reaped, many systems built in to take advantage of the new situation for their benefit and the benefit of their family.

Marriage is good for men. They earn more, live longer, are healthier, happier, have better relationships with their children, are far less likely to become addicted to drugs or alcohol or end up in prison, and enjoy numerous other benefits social benefits (and society enjoys numerous benefits from them reducing their total proportion of financial, emotional, penal, familial, and medical dependence). Less depressed, less unhealthy, less agressive, more socialized, longer living, productive men benefit themselves and society far more than the alternative. Marriage takes what is endemic to manhood and makes it serve the greater good of society in general, including and especially women, and also men. It takes what’s running a bit wild and undirected and directs and tames it.

And if you are, for some reason, doubtful about the value of taming such a force as manhood, I should point out that taming isn’t only a deconstructing process. It’s alchemical. It takes a thing apart so it can be put back together for a purpose, stronger. It transforms it into something greater. The goal isn’t to destroy manhood, but to fulfill it. That’s what humans do. We take things we find and we draw them upward into a higher structure of purpose. And in doing so we unlock their unknown potential.

Would anyone have known that there could be an animal that could essentially run forever without any metabolic degradation if humans hadn’t taken the wolf nature and shaped and tamed it for a purpose to create the husky? The power of fire or of a mighty river are terrible to behold. But could anyone have ever guessed what their potential was in the hands of mankind? With fire and water under our control we could reshape the world and it’s elements, make inedible food edible, make barren plains rich with life, create warmth and power and security in the farthest reaches of the world. The nature of mankind, yes, even men, is like a fire or a mighty river. It could burn down or wash away the world we love, or it could help us transform it and create new places and new wonders in it.

Again, I argue to men, being tamed isn’t a reductive process, even though it does involve bringing wild parts of yourself under control. It’s alchemical. It’s transformative. It’s a process that bring those parts under control and into alignment so they’re not struggling against each other, or against your future or extended self. It does this so it can bring the whole up into integration with a higher, longer, more extended purpose. And by that transformation of us it creates a power in us that can transform the world.

Now that’s a vision for manhood that is worth giving something for. It’s an idea of marriage that’s actually worth pursuing. There’s something there to love and pursue. Not only in the resulting better state of things for others, but in what it will do for you, and in what it will make of you. And that’s the sort of vision that is necessary to actually move people and change them ans get them to make hard choices and endure difficult transformations. And make no mistake, marriage is difficult, risky, and costly. There are always going to be plenty of forces pulling men away from it, to their own (and often to everyone’s) disadvantage. It’s a path that takes effort to remain on and will likely involve many falls and recoveries.

On the subject of women, I could say just as much as about men. And I believe that the realities faced by the sexes are something we can all learn to see and appreciate and understand through the lens of our common humanity and shared experience. Even where they are different. My own wife might not feel the same as I do, she might feel quite differently much of the time, but because our experiences spring from the same common well of shared humanity and differ primarily in expression, not being, they can be understood and appreciated. At least by analogy, if not directly. And isn’t that how we overcome all such problems of human individuality? We can’t actually directly share the experiences of another person or know what they’re feeling or thinking. We have no direct access to their experience of consciousness. But we do have our own. And we reason, by analogy, from our understanding of our own experience and how we express it to an understanding of theirs, by how they express it.

So the problem we face as men in understanding women or women understanding men isn’t fundamentally any greater than the problem we face in understanding anyone, it’s only qualitatively different. Having a touchstone of a shared gender experience is helpful in understanding people of our own sex and presents a problem in trying to understand the other sex, but these are already the sorts of problems we face with other humans in general.

Having said that, I still feel most qualified to speak primarily to men because I have a special investment in and understanding of the male experience. I have a home court advantage. But if I could step a little outside my home court, I think that women face a similar but different challenge in martial fidelity as men do.

The challenge is similar because the essential claim is still the same. Your sexuslity belongs to your partner. You’re making a decision to devote it to the benefit of your mutual relationship. The difference is just in what women are bringing to the table, what their needs and obstacles and tendencies are, and what they have to sacrifice and overcome. For men, the primary challenge is to take something that is wild and too loosely distributed and undirected and confining and directing it so it can be used for the benefit of the higher purpose. For women, the the greater challenege is to unlock something that is restrained and give it a safe space to be freely let loose and given.

Sex therapy for men usually centers around applying the right accelerants. Sex therapy for women usually centers on removing the impediments and easing up the brakes, creating a welcoming space for that part of them to become engaged. And that doesn’t only mean building trust, confidence, security, and freedom, it means giving trust, practicing confidence, acting securely, and using freedom. Infidelity isn’t just something men and women avoid, fidelity is something you actively practice.

Fidelity for a woman means contributing availability. And this, for women, is a big sacrifice. If you don’t think women have something at risk by making themselves sexuality available, then you haven’t seen a woman go through a pregnancy. Even more, you haven’t seen a woman go through the struggles of raising a family on her own, as so many women across the world are doing. Men are very unlikely to die directly as a result of having sex. A man can literally have sex and walk away and not even know what the result was. Even with advances in birth control making it a much less risky prospect, it’s still a lot harder for women. Their health and future could be irrevocably affected by the actions of a moment.

But pregnancy isn’t the only way in which it’s a greater sacrifice for women to make themselves available. Marriage, in its complexity as a social relationship across time, doesn’t just require singular fidelity of the partners, men being willing to be exclusive for a while (while the couple is trying to have children, for example) or women being willing to be similarly available for a while, it’s about finding a long term, stable basis for the relationship by engaging in continual fidelity. In other words, they stay faithful and available to one another. And that’s going to be a perpetual struggle for both of them.

Sex is a bit trickier for women. They’re letting something into themselves. There’s a real statistical likelihood of discomfort and even pain, and a very decent chance that it won’t end in easy, effortless pleasure and fulfillment. That’s a much, much rarer issue with men, if not completely unheard of. Women have to deal with infections and periods and dryness and muscular discomfort and hormonal changes that affect how their body reacts on a daily basis. It’s a very delicate area, very private, very complicated, very vulnerable. Just making it physically accessible means prostrating themselves in positions of extreme vulnerability. And men need to and want to literally hammer away at it like they’re trying to knock a hole through it. Which in a way I suppose they are.

Women are also much more complicated to arouse. For men, one little blue pill that merely increases blood flow a bit mostly solved the massive problem of male sexual dysfunction. But solving that same problem for women has proved an intractable quagmire. There is no “little blue pill” one shot wonder for women. Women require very different and much more complicated conditions for arousal, not least of which is their own psychological willingness (their lack of indifference or even reluctance) to be aroused. And even after overcoming all those psychological and emotional barriers there are still the actual physical techniques that need to be employed.

Even if you’ve got a woman as far as being ready and willing to have sex, research suggests a large portion of all women can’t reach orgasm by vaginal stimulation alone. They have massive potential: multi-directional and locational sensitivity, multi-orgasmic possibility, an immense variety of qualitatively different types and varieties of orgasms and physical reactions, deep physical and emotional engagement. But the learning curve for such a complex system is way steeper than it is for men.

And those are just some of the problems on the physical side of things. A man’s sexuality, like his penis, is built for venturing out. For spending itself. The trick is to spend itself wisely. A woman’s sexuality, like her vagina, is built for conservation. It’s a secure place that is protected, a place of growth and nurturing and investment. It requires effort and tact and care and understanding. To use a somewhat trite metaphor, a woman’s sexuality is like a walled garden. And it’s hard for men not to try to climb the gate of every garden they pass. As well, it’s hard for women to allow access to all calls at their gate.

One point I’m trying to make here is that it can be just as hard for women to be available as it is for men to be exclusive. Both partners want fidelity from their spouse, and both are willing to exchange vows pledging their own fidelity to one another in order to secure it. The promise being made is that the other partner will, to the best of their ability, honor and fulfill that investment. That the sacrifice of security in keeping your sexuality in your own hands will be fulfilled to an even greater degree by placing it in your partner’s hands.

For men, that means a daily effort at only spending that part of yourself on devotion to your wife. And for women, that means a daily effort at actively engaging your sexuality with your partner. I don’t necessarily mean having sex every day. Your sexuality is more than sex. It’s attention, affection, direction of interest, intimacy, welcoming, pursuing, acts of kindness and little pleasures, touches, glances, making yourself attractive, all the little things that indicate that turn toward one another and the devotion of that aspect of your selfhood toward one another and toward unity (of which sex is the symbolic and practical ultimate expression). Sex isn’t something you have every day, but it is something you do every day.

And yes, it can be hard. It can be exhausting for both partners. Please don’t underestimate the difficulty your partner is facing in maintaining their fidelity to you. Don’t take for granted their efforts that are the result of a deliberate devotion and investment, not merely the result of an easy and thoughtless habit. Maybe, if we truly understood from the inside exactly what we were signing up for we wouldn’t have the courage to go through with it. So many things in life are like that. If women truly knew the scope of what it meant to decide that they were going to devote themselves as the receptacle for all their husband’s love and attention and devotion and attraction and fulfillment (which sounds great, like becoming an object of exalted worship, and it is like that, but being made an object of exclusive, devoted worship means you carry the burden of accepting and receiving all that worship, no one else), they might hesitate at taking on that role.

The problem is, the partnership relies for its health on the assumption that both partners will make an equal and unqualified exchange of fidelity to one another. A woman’s investment in availability to her husband will be wasted if he isn’t practicing fidelity and exclusivity to her. And a man’s fidelity and investment in exclusivity to his wife will be wasted if she isn’t practicing fidelity and availability to him. Because fidelity is an exchange, a sort of economy, it only works when it works in reciprocation. Fidelity that isn’t reciprocated can be taken as a betrayal of the partnership. And that’s a recipe for resentment and withholding and eventual disaster. A protectionist approach to trade doesn’t work in a marriage.

Two final notes:

First, we should always remember that each sex also shares in the sacrifice and responsibility of the other sex. On average, it might be less of their total contribution and struggle in life. Men have just as much an obligation to be appropriately available as women and women have just as much an obligation to be appropriately faithful as men. Both owe each other fidelity in both senses. Relative differences will simply alter the average proportions at a given time. But it’s certainly possible to have indifferent, reluctant, unavailable, closed off men. And it’s certainly possible to have wild, impulsive, undirected, unfaithful women. Biology tends to disencentivize us from these positions, but they arise quite commonly, especially given the right conditions.

Second, it’s very important to remember that we’ve got to give each other some space for imperfection. We won’t alway be able to be completely perfect in accommodating one another, even in a good relationship, and we’ve got to make allowances for that.

A note on extreme circumstances. Masturbation, periods, when fidelity gets hard. There are some extemee challenges to fidelity in daily life. For men, there is a radical new challenge to fidelity in the form of pornography. It’s a problem that has reached epidemic proportions so quickly that it’s really just something most people have to take for granted as part of the landscape of sexuality. Your kids are likely to have learned the majority of what they know about sex from it. The majority of men in your church are likely to be viewing it. Your teens are likely to be imitating it. Your cultural influences are likely to be referencing it and joking about it. The internet is pretty much built on it (and on cats). So it’s a pretty big deal.

So why is pornography such a problem for fidelity? Well, the real reason it is is that it isn’t. It’s a new kind of structural challenge. It’s totally different, in many ways, from the obstacle that an affair presents, or even prostitution. It’s (typically) free. It doesn’t enmesh you into into new relationships (necessarily). It comes with no risk of sexually transmitted disease. It carries no risk of pregnancy. It’s much less emotionally involving. And all of these benefits are also what wrong with it, basically. It’s easy. It’s low on consequences. It’s not terribly hard to engage in it and keep everything else going along looking relatively the same. It’s more controllable than most habits. It’s common. It’s excusable. It’s a respectable sin, to a certain degree. And so it’s everywhere.

The threat that pornography presents to fidelity is that its not like exposing yourself to a dangerous animal or taking a turn down an unknown path that may take you far from your destination. It’s not obviously a dangerous new friend or pasttime. It seems quite benign. But what it is like, is like a little shunt placed into your vein, diverting a bit of that river, drawing away some of that investment you owe to someone else, drip, drip, drip. If sex is the fire or the flood that gives men much of their energy and drives them on, pornography is the opiate that makes being driven anywhere much less necessary.

With pornography, I can easily get exactly what I want, when I want it, with absolute minimal effort, exactly how I want it, with no risk or investment or need to make anything of myself or risk anything of myself. And that is exactly the problem. That is a taming that truly makes of you less than you could be. It demands nothing of you, raises you up into nothing, add nothing to you. It makes you a puppet of your own sexuality. It makes you purely self referential, self relational. It makes your sexuality into into a tautological statement. It’s conclusion is equivalent to its premise.

As a man, for better or for worse, you owe that desire to your spouse. You owe that semen, to put it bluntly, to your wife. You owe that surge of oxytocin that men only get after an orgasm, that helps to bind you to the objects of value and meaning in your life, to your wife. She is supposed to be the beneficiary of that. And there’s some very interesting research about the effect of that surge on the brains of men and how it can specifically cause them to perceive their long term partner, and only their long term partner, as more attractive the more that pathway is reinforced.

If you siphon away a large portion of that fire, that flood, that drive and passion, you’re stealing from the life source of your relationship. You’re cheating your end of the partnership. And however small a drain it may be, however manageable, however controllable, however without risk, even however necessary it may seem (if your wife struggles with bringing her fidelity to meet yours), the end result is that there is always a cost. It is always sub-optimal. You and your spouse, and who your spouse is to you, and who you are to them, your relationship in other words, will always be less than it could be.

Women, of course, face their own challenges. Not least of which is that men are often not as attractive, in every way, as they could be. And often the prospect of making yourself available to them isn’t exactly a compelling one. In fact it might seem nice if the men were a bit less handsy and needy in this area. If might be nice if every other ejaculation could be taken off the table without needing your body as a receptacle. But unfortunately that’s not the sort of loss of relational income you can forgo without suffering a serious depreciation in the value of your own position.

If you make your husband need you less, and especially if you accomplish it by having him find some other way to meet those needs, you’ve just sold one of the greatest advantages and instruments for strengthening and maintaining your relationship down the river. Sex is such an easy way to show a man love and make him feel valued. It’s such an easy way to get him interested and excited and calmed and restored and motivated and delighted. It makes him happier and healthier. It’s so easy, you have the means right to hand, and all the advantages are in your favor. So why would you ever consider trading that power away to anyone or anything else? The internet isn’t offering it to him for his benefit, or for yours. They’re in it to extract something. They’re trying to steal a source of human capital that belongs to you.

So be careful what you wish for, is the lesson. Both men and women might see some advantage to the harmless ease by which pornography loosens the grip of sex on human relationships. It isn’t a humanitarian service. And it’s likely to impoverish you both. To quote an amusing satirical song of past years, every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great. Not to put too fine a point on it, but every sperm is sacred, because they exist to draw you closer to your partner. Those sperm belong to her, wild and silly and inconveniently frequent and irrationally impulsive as they are. Sperm are relational capital, and if you’re skipping deposits, either because you can’t be bothered to go to the bank or if the bank can’t be bothered to be open, you’re losing out on future relational capital. You’re hemmoraging value. And that makes you vulnerable.

Of course, there are also times when it is very challenging as a woman to maintain fidelity through availability. If you’re going to expect a man to bank exclusively with you, you’re taking a certain amount of responsibility to make use of and accept his devotion and loyalty. And that’s not always easy. I don’t know about most husbands, but I’m not always the most suave or attractive fellow. And life often creates stressful situations that do not make women feel like sex. Work is physically and emotionally exhausting, kids are basically wild animals you’re taming for large portions of their lives, sickness and tiredness and the desire to just get away and get some sleep rear their heads quite often. Frankly, it’s a wonder women ever feel like conditions are conducive to sex. And then there’s the whole issue of periods, when you just don’t have the capability, and sex is pretty much the last thing on your mind. And if you do have kids and are breastfeeding, those hormones can consume your mind and body, so almost nothing else exists for you except your baby and their needs. Your spouse and your relationship can easily get forgotten, and considering the demands on your mind and body it’s perfectly understandable.

And that’s the thing. It’s perfectly understandable, all these obstacles to intimacy, all these impediments to reciprocal fidelity. They’re perfectly simple and excusable and compelling. But they also present a potential problem. And if you haven’t grasped how serious a problem they might present, then you weren’t oaying attention to the alst section. This loss of flow between you is less like a shunt in the vein and more like a clot. The pressure builds up. The tissues down the line may begin to get anemic. There’s risk of a rupture in the vessel (a dangerous loss of containment of the energies flowing in), and a risk that important living parts of the relationship body might get starved for air and sustenance. They’re such small, natural, understandable impediments.

So how do you handle these dry periods and the risk they present? As far as the details go, that’s up to each couple to figure out through some honest communication. Men need to be honest about their needs, and women need to be honest about theirs. And they have to negotiate and figure out what each can handle and how much each can compromise to make room for the other. The important thing is simply that both partners be aware that there is a problem to be solved, that there is a negotiation that needs to take place. You can’t take for granted that there won’t be any effect or loss to either or both of you if you ignore this issue.

I myself suffered immensely during the period of my wife’s breastfeeding. I’m not saying that I didn’t perfectly understand the causes behind our situation, but understanding it didn’t make the impact on me and on our relationship less severe. Having a child, giving all that care and missing all that sleep, is extremely stressful and places a great deal of strain on a relationship. Add on top of it the loss of a primary conduit for relational attachment, appeasement, reinforcement, intimacy, and exclusive connection, and you’ve got a serious relational deficit. Your relationship bank will be cashing big checks every day, with very few deposits keeping the economy going. There might be very good reasons why neither the customers nor the bankers are getting around to doing much business, but that doesn’t mean it won’t show up red in the books at a time when you’re making your greatest withdrawals.

Periods can be trying times too. For a long time I was mystified by why, suddenly, the whole world would see so much worse to my wife. Why everything would suddenly be so annoying to her, including me. And why things that were perfectly fine the day before were intractable existential problems the next day. And I would be running around wringing my hands trying to figure out what to do and where things went all wrong. And then at some point I started to realize there was a pattern, and to anticipate its effects even, to recognize the signs. I’m still trying to get a handle on when exactly the signs of the clearing storm are showing themselves.

I think it’s important to bring up these examples, pregnancy and periods, to make a point of sympathy between men and women. It’s easy for both of us to discount and dismiss the effects of our respective hormones upon the other person. When we experience them, we feel their demands on ourselves as necessary and irresistible and without need for explanation or justification. And when we see their demands on our spouse, we see them irrational, idiotic, random, annoying, and crazy.

The thing to remember is that all the advantages are actually on your side, as a woman, when it comes to fidelity.

How to demonstrate fidelity. How, on a practical level, can you show your fidelity to your spouse? Let’s assume that you’ve come to see the value of this mutual exchange in your relationship and want to lean in to it and increase the economy of your interaction. You want to build your society. You want to make the necessary sacrifices. You believe in the vision. How can you actually do that?

One easy way you can pursue fidelity is through approaching it as a positive instead of a merely negative virtue. If I was going to analogize marriage as a kind of treaty between independent parties, the least accurate comparison would be a military treaty. A marriage isn’t only about what you won’t do to the other person, isn’t only about ending hostilities between the sexes. It’s more like a diplomatic or ecomonimc treaty. Yes, there are rules and regulations you put in place to protect your interests. But the whole reason for the rules is to add safe walls around a protected space where you can have a freer and more productive exchange. Fidelity isn’t only about what you won’t do, it’s about what you will do.

So what, as a man, can you do to devote your attention to your wife? How can you invest in her? How can she invest in you? What kind of investment might each of you really appreciate, need, or benefit from? I think the hardest part of answering this question is learning not to answer the question “How can I invest in fidelity to my spouse?” with how you would like your spouse to invest in you. Whenever we consider whatever someone else would like or need, we tend to look to the most obvious place for understanding of other people: ourselves. This is perfectly natural. And it’s a great starting point. But because your spouse may not, actually be you, you might need to add an extra step where you figure out how they are similar to you, how they are different from you, and then reason by analogy from your own experience to understand theirs.

As I said earlier, we’re all human, and share more than we differ. But since the expression of similar needs differs between people and quite often between the sexes, we have to be a bit more creative in how we figure out how to cater to those needs. For a long time I resented a lot of the ways my wife was different from me and how she cared about things that didn’t matter to me. If she would just stop letting those things bother her, she could be happy just like me, was my reasoning. And this is a common complaint between the sexes. If you could just stop being the way you are and be like me, everything would be easier. If you weren’t so emotional or sensitive or picky, if you weren’t so boorish and insensitive and thoughtless. And maybe there’s some truth to it. Maybe life would be easier if our needs, strengths, faults, and desires were met by someone who perfectly mirrored and understood them.

Having observed humanity in general, though, I have to dismiss this as a hopeless pipe dream. When it comes to sex, it’s possible. That’s what pornography tends to do for us, it reflects our own desires back to us and gives us exactly what we want in the same way that we want it. It turns us in our own own desires, so our desires become their own object, rather than an incentive that pushes us to pursue an actual object outside ourselves. It is an uncreative exchange, both figuratively and literally, as it results in no new creation. There is no combination, no transformation. Without the challenge, we also lose the full potential for growth.

Not that I’m suggesting you should marry the most difficult to understand and hardest to live with person you can. Being with another person in any complex relationship is already a challenge. Add in differences in sex and you’ve already got enough challenge to keep most people busy for a lifetime. A good marriage can do more for your education and character than all the schools and monasteries in America. But you should try to find an appropriate match for yourself, if you can. An equal partner who will give as much as they demand from you.

It occurs to me now that my original question in this section was meant to be how, practically, to show fidelity to your spouse, and I may have got off track. But, to be honest, I think those questions are ones you have to figure out for yourself by careful reflection and by conversation with your spouse. My wife gets a lot out of my daily care for her sore shoulder. She also genuinely appreciated me killing spiders for her, something I view as a needless duty. But she honors me by looking to me to fulfill that duty for her, even if it is something she really could take on herself. Just because it doesn’t mean anything to me and do anything for me as a duty doesn’t mean it doesn’t have meaning for her. Marriage is about taking on responsibility for your spouse’s needs and desires, not dictating or criticizing them.

I eventually realized that having a clean house gives my wife a special sense of emotional stability, the feeling that chaos is held at bay, and that that makes her much happier and more creative as a spouse. The fact that I was able to live without feeling any special stress over a slightly messy home environment and was able to clean without having it have any emotional significance seemed to me to be rather an excellence in myself and a deficit in her. But at some point I stopped fighting the ways that she was different from me and started appreciating them and making use of them. There were needs there I could fill, roles I could take on, jobs I could do. There was an opportunity for relational productivity, and I was missing it because I was too concerned with my own economy and what I wanted and cared about instead of what my partner wanted and cared about.

In many ways, we’re all still children, buying presents for people that we really want for ourselves, and acting mystified when they don’t seem to appreciate them. In children, this is natural, because they haven’t yet developed their consciousness beyond the idea of their own selves. They haven’t yet developed the creative imagination required to conceptualize the inner states and desires of others. But that’s a skill that marriage requires continually. As well as an enormous amount of patience for the enormous number of times we will fail each other in this respect.

A reliable guide of any vision that asks you to submit itself to support its cause is what it wants to make of you. If it seeks to make you less than the totality of what you are, you can’t trust that it knows you well enough to use you well, or that it knows the good enough to help you pursue it. Whether it is willing to settle for any less of you than the highest, most complete, most extended and integrated conception of yourself is true test of its commitment to you. Any ideology that won’t know you and accept you for what you really are is lying to itself. Any ideology that won’t push you to know and accept who you could really be is lying to you. Neither can help you. A true vision for a human being can’t be merely placatory of who you are, and you can’t be be merely a tool or generic cog in its project to build something with you. The worst ideologies that claim greatness will try to buy your alliegance to their program in one or the other of these ways. They’ll either subsume you into the great, unchangeable, unchallengable rock of what you are, or into the glorious, undifferentiated ether of what they wish you to be. You’ll be induced to either swallowed by yourself or by something far beyond yourself. It is a very rare ideology indeed that can balance the two aspects of our nature to respect both our nature and our potential. That in drawing us up into it is also is drawn down into us. That meets animal and divinity in a single space and finds a way for them to live together without destroying one another. As I say, the true test of an ideology is how low it will meet you and how high it will take you.

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In marriage, you essentially agree to trade your right to yourself, the right to meet your own needs as well as the responsibility for , in return for the rights to and responsibility for someone else. You give up the right to say “my needs”, because they don’t solely belong to you any more. You can’t have them without them impacting the person you’re united to. You can’t discharge your responsibilities without them contributing to a larger sense of shared being, either for better or worse.

A note on sex as an economy. One major problem that affects the economy between the sexes in any existing or prospective relationship is the massive devaluation of sex that has happened over the last five decades. Sex is a good that has always been in relatively short supply, it required some effort to secure. There have always been this who were willing to supply it at a discount, to their advantage. And men especially have always sought alternative sources. But access to sex has always been controlled by women, who among humans engage in mate selection and who do desire mates but are picky about them because of the high cost and risk to themselves. So there has been a sort of cartel of women that control the price and availability of sex in a society. What men have to do to earn access. And solidarity has always been very important among women. Betraying the cartel by giving away the product cheaply, on the side, betrays the interest of the whole group and is subject to social shaming.

But now we’re in a very different situation. Partly it has been made possible by the advent of reliable birth control. Although it’s not clear that the reduction in the immediate consequences actually offsets the overall increase in consequences. Women are less likely to get pregnant accidentally, and STDs are far more avoidable and preventable, but actual absolute rates of unintended pregnancy, STDs, and abortions haven’t gone down much (in fact in some cases they’ve gone up, way up) because the marketplace has become so much more unregulated. Women are also ending up with way fewer fathers for their children, and far less secure sexual partners. So their economy and their interest have actually been damaged.

The devaluation of sex as a currency has, in many ways, been very much to the disadvantage of women and to the advantage of men. Because sex in one form or another is in cheap, easily available supply, there isn’t much reason to devote a lot of resources to it. You can always get it somewhere else cheaper. And we have anenormously cheap, easy to access substitute that is fairly free of cost, social risk, or risk of disease. I of course mean pornography. Porn drastically devalues sex and actual women by making an end run around all the costly human complications and going all in on the basic compulsive pathways of reward: visual stimulus and physical release. Having access to just those key elements is all that’s really needed to take over those reward pathways in the brain and develop a dependence on a habit rather than a person.

Much like many drugs shortcut the reward circuitry in the brain and tread out a short but powerful superhighway of easy reward for intense and complex motivational structures, so pornography creates a false economy that allows you to bypass the traditional one. It’s not dissimilar to the way you can be diverted into playing a video game about life (that is much simpler, easier, straightforward, and knows how to easily tickle those reward structures) instead of actually living it yourself. And if the real economy is often difficult, confounding, hard to navigate, humiliating, frustrating, exhausting, and disappointing, who wouldn’t say no to an easy, guaranteed win in a simulated economy? It might not be entirely as real, but it might be real enough. And your brain will adjust to treat it as if it is the real thing and not really worry too much about what else you might be missing. The primary reward stimuli are there, so that might be enough.

The new system advantages men in some other ways. It used to be that there were certain outcomes, such as having two partners at once, or access to a large group of varied partners, or other behaviors that appeal to very specific tastes and inclinations, that carried a pretty high price. They were available, but generally you had to achieve a lot to earn them. The average man couldn’t live like a sultan, seeing a parade of the most beautiful women in the world before his eyes, enjoying access to an indulgent garden of delights and whims. He couldn’t expect to have the chance to mate with a succession of beautiful women, or two women at once, or to get to perform certain kinds of acts. He couldn’t expect to get away with a lot of things and a lot of attitudes. But a lot of men these days do expect that. Because sex has been devalued and the cartel has been broken, they can always find someone or something that will cheaply cater to those desires. In the old days, you could earn that sort of status to violate those sorts of limitations, but you needed to be one in a million. Now the average college kid thinks he should have a shot at it.

Of course our society is almost hilariously schizophrenic, simultaneously creating the conditions to enable to most sexually self indulgent behavior in men while also castigating and berating them for making women the objects of those desires. We tell men to do and have whatever they want and show it to them so they expect it, and then criticize them as pigs and rapists for wanting it. It’s not wonder so many have turned to safer and more secure sources of pleasure like pornography. As I recently read is a growing sentiment among the youth in the book iGen, real, complex relationships with real, complex people simply aren’t worth the effort. In other words, they don’t think the risk of the investment is worth the payoff. So they’re seeking less risky avenues for investment. And let’s be honest, an investment in another human, especially someone of the opposite sex (which might lead to even further complications) is a really big, risky, difficult investment. And if the primary carrot that used to be used to motivate those investments has been taken away and other substitute ecnoninis have been developed, if the traditional economy has been derided as exploitative, unrewarding, and needless, then why shouldn’t the majority of people abandon it? At minimum there is likely to be a retreat from marriage and having children and the typical family structure. At maximum you would expect to see the rise of all kinds of alternative sexual lifestyles, from hookup culture to pornophilia to furry conventions. Prostitution, as the “oldest profession” is really just the oldest alternative economy to the dynamic between the sexes that has produced and sustained the species. And it continues to exist, but even prostitution has morphed in many ways into less costly versions of itself to adapt to the times and the revaluing of sex. After all, why expect to risk disease and social shame, pay exorbitant fees, and even risk jail time when you can get something pretty similar from a cam session? And lots of escorts have moved into this lower investment, lower risk market themselves. There are tradeoffs, but peopoe these days are more interested in reducing risk than they used to be. We’ve become accustomed to our security and the benefits of respectability and lack of risk. Something that cheap shouldn’t need to be risky.

And this attitude, the attitude of sex as cheap and the attendant attitudes that brings, perhaps define our cultural attitude more than any other factor. This economic assumption underwrites a majority of our current cultural attitudes about sex across the board. It provides the impetus for our attitudes and outrage when we see our economic expectations being violated, much as the discovery of a nine dollar hot dog at a fair full of crowded, hungry people would. Sex isn’t just cheap and freely available, it should be cheap. You should be able to get what you want, when you want it, how you want it. We should all have the freedom and access of kings and queens. And we’ll be damned if we will give it up or let anyone cut off our access to those markets.

What will the long term consequences of the breaking of the sexual cartel be? It’s hard to say. On a society-wide level I think we’re already seeing it. People at the top income levels and education levels, despite in words declaring such things passe, hold to the old traditions more than others and enjoy many material benefits as a result. One positive effect of wide scale social conventions and limitations around things like sex is that they tended to act as an equalizer. People at the bottom could enjoy the benefits of access to them as well as people at the top. And having everyone subject to the same limitations maintained a certain level of consistency and egalitarianism. And you at least know where you stood and what the system was and what your options were, and a lot of people could find a place in it somewhere. You didn’t have to invent a whole new mode of being every generation for each specific individual.

Effectively catering to the tastes of every possible individual has always been a tricky prospect. One of the most dominant and popular forms of pornography today is hentai, which includes cartoons, monsters, fictional characters, tentacle crestures, and anthropomorphic animals. In other words, one of the most popular categories of sexual interest today is in partners who you literally could not have physical sex with at all. But that won’t stop people from trying. The obstacles aren’t slowing anyone down. That’s their kink, and it seems to be very common.

So what, in a world of cheaply available pleasures that cater to our most obscure and previously impractical desires, is a person to do? And if I didn’t make this clear at the outset, by cheaply I mean easily secured in every sense, with little cost (social, reputational, financial, familial, physical, legal, etc). There isn’t much price to say to get whatever it is that you want, either up front or in consequence. And we’re always striving to find ways to lower the price further and open up the markets even more.

I think the first step is to ask ourselves is what we have actually given up by ending the cartel, opening up the markets, and devaluing sex? What was it that economy was actually producing that made it so widespread and persistent and justified such honorifics and protections? What are the costs of cheap sex and the flight of investment from the traditional economy between the sexes? Who has the most to lose? Men or women, adults or children, individuals or societies?

I also think it’s worth asking whether our current valuation of sex (and continued efforts to devalue it further) is actually appropriate. Is it possible that we are undervaluing this investment? What are the long term individual and social consequences of the devaluation of sex? Considering how far we have already gone in devaluing sex and deregulation of the markets, what limits exist that could theoretically restrain how far we might go? Is there a bottom to this market? Have we already reached it, or are we just getting started? Is there any logical line or limit to prevent the progression that has hardly stopped in five decades? Do we have any good reason to think that the currency won’t keep dropping? And what is the next alternative economy?

These are all questions we should ask before we embark on our next round of sweeping changes. And if the new economy is justified, we might wonder why some people are still clinging to the old one and what they’re getting out of it. We might want to look at the actual data about outcomes and consider whether the old economy still represents a winning investment proposition. And we might want to consider how possible investment in the old economy actually is when there is such a crowd of alternatives freely available and clamoring for attention and making you question why you should bother confining yourself to such a strategy. Their mere existence raises a challenge to the whole system. If a fellow could do this or have that, in so many different ways, without much cost, why pay such an onerous cost to restrain oneself to participation in traditional investments?

I don’t think this is a question we’ve answered sufficiently yet. It’s very similar to the problem of our society expecting us to act as if sex was terribly costly and valuable and sacred and dangerous and requires so much care and policing of ourselves while simultaneously in a hundred other ways telling us that it’s nothing like that. What are we supposed to do with these kinds of mixed messages?

I suppose we can add this to the long list of things where getting whatever we want, whenever we want, has produced some unexpected consequences. We’re still trying to figure it out with regard to something as simple as food. We love the cheap availability and variety that caters to our every taste and whim, but at the same time have to admit that obesity has become a bigger problem and drain on our present and future than hunger. Do we redefine what it means to be healthy? That’s certainly a strategy some people are exploring, rejecting the tyranny of traditional norms about body composition and health as artificial, oppressive, and unnecessary constraints.

One final note. I think it is useful to think about the relationship between the sexes, in some ways, as an economy. A mutually beneficial relationship based on the exchange between differing parties who each have something unique to contribute and something unique they wish to secure and can do so more adequately in a common structure. That doesn’t mean I’m saying that sex is reductively transactional. There is a sense in which sex is transactional, of course. But what you mean by that can vary quite a bit. All of our best activities are all in some sense transactional, in that they involve action, and that invokes cause and effect. We act because we think some effect will be produced that we wish to produce. All deliberate human activity is transactional in this sense. We trade action in the present for future states we desire. I feed and care for my child because I expect some result to occur that pleases me. That doesn’t mean it isn’t also good for them, or that such action isn’t good in some more elevated sense for me that the most bald sense of impulsive self gratification. Economies can be transactional and also devoted to producing the highest quality of goods, the most important and essential goods for human survival and flourishing.

So yes, the relationship between the sexes is “transactional”, but the terms of those transactions, the regulations you put in place to protect and define your activity, the goal of the goods being produced, in fact the whole expression of what that economy is and what it is producing and how and for whom can vary enormously. And that is where our moral judgment should focus, on how well an economy addresses the complete breadth of human needs and dimensions of human life extended across time.

And marriage, as a durable union extends across time through generations, that seeks as its object a union of mutual economy in all possible dimensions of human life, from the physical to the emotional to the spiritual, financial, cultural, social, familial, and even recreational, seems worthy of serious respect and consideration. It might be a transaction. But so is everything. And the scale of a transaction, and the products of its exchange, is the real measure of its value, not the fact that it is one.

One question that will have to be asked is, once you’ve taken the steps of devaluing sex and deregulsting the markets, can you ever put that genie back in the bottle? On a societal level, I would say not at all easily. And that makes it terribly hard on an individual level. Sex being cheap means it’s very hard to maintain your economy. It takes an effort. It always did, but society used to have you back and be actively investing in your value and helping you keep it secure. Now society is doing quite the opposite.

It’s the same problem as trying to follow a diet in our food-saturated culture. There are advertisements everywhere, restaurants everywhere, snacks everywhere, anything you could want and imagine displayed before you at every turn, easily available. And you can’t help but feel, why shouldn’t you get the same as everybody else is getting? Why shouldn’t I get my soup and sandwich from Panera, and maybe a cookie. And maybe a fun drink. And maybe a cinnamon strusel bagel for the road.

At least that’s how I feel. Life is hard and busy, and it’s nice to have something pleasurable that just gives you what you want when you want it. It fills a need, and it makes you feel good. Why wish life to be harder than it already is? As a result, I could stand to lose some weight. It’s probably costing me quite a bit in my current levels of health and energy and costing me even more off my future life and health. But that’s primarily wasted potential, a deficit in what I could be. And a lot of it I’ll just never see. And it hard to measure what I’ll never be against what I get to have today. And that’s a crispy chicken sandwich with fries and a drink. And isn’t that what we all want, what we all have? Why should I have any less just for some theoretical “better” state?

On a purely human level, and as the national data attests, this isn’t an easy question to answer. About food or about sex or about anything. Why shouldn’t we have what we want and what makes us happy? How could we possibly give it up when it’s everywhere, when it’s part of our lives?

So what does that mean for those of us who actually want to try to live differently in such a culture? It means it’s gonna be really, really hard. Alcoholics in a bar at happy hour hard. We’ve designed the appeal of so many aspects of our culture to be intrinsically addictive. Our media (including social media) is psychologically addictive, our food and drink are physically addictive, our drugs are obviously addictive, and our sexual opportunities are physically and psychologically addictive. What kind of reasonable expectations can you have for other people, or even yourself, in that kind of environment? Are women just going to have to share men with pornography? Are the mechanisms that are designed to addict a man to his wife even going to work when there’s so much cheaper competition in town?

One thing we’ve come to resent about the idea of marriage is the need to rely on or depend on another person. We rather seem to resent it. We don’t need no man. We want our independence. And the door swings both ways. Men resent their dependence on women too and also seek their independence. No one in the right mind actually wants to need or rely on another person, insecure and out of our control as such an arrangement is, if we could secure for our needs otherwise. And so we’ve been hard at work breaking down the systems that cause us to need or rely on one another, and then wonder why we can’t find reliable partners who will commit to us any more.

It is a dreadful thing to be confined by, having to rely on someone else for an important need. Not least because they might let us down, perhaps badly. Or we might find someone or something else that could do the job better. So why subject yourself to slavery at the whims and inadequacies of another person, especially a person of another sex who likely doesn’t even understand you or appreciate your needs or contributions properly?

And let’s be honest, we have disappointed one another. We’re often not getting what we wanted, or what we think we could or should have. And you probably think what the other person wants is stupid and imposes on you unfairly, and that how they’ve used their position has been outrageous and exploitative and has made a fool out of you. You probably hate, on some level, the idea of being in another person’s power, being reliant on them, hate the dependence, hate what they seem to be demanding of you.

To all that I say, I understand one hundred percent. I think one of the hardest things to understand and accept is that we all feel that way to at least some degree, or at certain times. And we’re all looking for alternatives, an escape, a bit of independence, another option. And fidelity and dependence is, in fact, a humiliation. It’s a way of labeling us as insufficient in ourselves. The words “I need you” (or “I need an man/woman”) are a humiliation to independent and self sufficient and fulfilled beings like ourselves. They speak of a deep inadequacy. And they are also a terrible imposition, a demand on us by others to provide something for them we could not possibly be held responsible for, a burden we should not possibly have to bear. I can’t be the meaning of your life (or you the meaning of mine). I’m the meaning of my own life.

And other humans do make terribly disappointing partners when burdened with this expectation. You couldn’t pick a more unreliable and ill-informed and ill-equipped provider.

So, why in the hell do we do it? Better yet, why in the hell should we? You would need a pretty compelling reason to even consider such a mad proposal. And accepting it would require an enormous amount of courage, or at least delusion and naiveté. In fact taking such a leap isn’t merely an agreement or proposition, it’s an act of faith. It’s the wagering of a whole life by aligning it behind a proposition about where committing to belief in a vision of life will lead. If a strategy for life is an economy, faith is the decision to truly go all in an an ultimate, costly scheme because you really believe that the scheme will work. Some schemes, of course, ask you to wager very little. But some schemes ask you to wager everything, your whole present, your autonomy, your security, your control, on the often uncertain odds that you’re more likely to gain in the end.

But men genuinely are interested, or at least act interested, in women. They’re nice to them, they do things for them, they hold back an enormous amount of their behavior, including aggressive and competitive (and gross) behavior, around them. When men do turn against women, there’s a vengeful sort of relentlessness to it. The violence of the betrayal of instinct and the revenge of transgression and unleashed restraint. It’s not how they instinctively want to relate to them, and so it gathers reactive force.

There are basic, physical things about women that trigger deeply programmed responses in the human brain, just as there are with adults and children. And in fact they’re some of the same tricks. The high soft voice, smooth hairless skin, larger more widely set eyes, a softer, less aggressive manner, a more delicate physicality, increased deposits of subcutaneous tissue. Those are all examples of natalism. The tendency of physical festures associated with childhood (and thus programmed responses to childhood) in adults. The response to those big eyes is so fundamental it even works across species. Humans can’t help but gush over a puppy, even though it’s not even one of the young of their own species. They hear those high voices, feel that soft face, see those big eyes, and melt. Domesticated animals, like dogs, retain these endearing physical traits into adulthood. That’s one of their distinctive features. And so do women. What do men get? Aggressive musculature, overdeveloped brows and chins, back hair, and male pattern baldness. So clearly men are going to have to work a bit harder to make themselves instinctively loveable, rather than threatening.

Most men can’t help feeling the reaction “Oh, it’s a woman, how nice, I had better restrain myself”, any more than most humans can ignore their instinctive reactions to puppies, and small children. I have two little girls, and I’ve seen people overcome by altruistic instincts at the mere sight of them. I’ve seen flinty-jawed, irascible old men suddenly soften. I’ve seen blatant prejudice. The mechanisms are buried so deeply in us, beyond conscious thought. You can criticize them all you like, if you think that’s somehow helpful for the species, but you can’t pry it out of us. And if you ever did, you might not like the results.

Now, obviously men and women are often friends, although far less often than men are friends with men and women with women. People and their relationships are complex enough that most people need to be forced together to overcome significant barriers of difference.

Most people gravitate toward what’s easy. We’re friends with whoever is convenient because of our interests, work, and established social life. We’re friends with people who are close to us because they’re in our workplace or school or house, or just related to us. We’re creatures of convenience, and proximity matters a lot, even in important relationships like marriage. Difference in sex alone can provide a large enough barrier to make it too much work to be deeply interested in or involved with someone of a different sex.

Unless, of course, there’s the possibility of coupling on the table. That’s provides a huge motivation, even when it’s only a minor possibility, to connect to people and prove your value in the eyes of the opposite sex.

People are complex, of course, both in what attracts them (as people, in a general sense) to one another, and what pushes them apart. Convenience, shared interests, kinship, similar personalities, similar values, and yes, physical attraction (even outside the possibility mating, we are just generally interested in attractive people).

Having read a good bit about child development and the sexes, children reach this natural point where they start self selecting into different groups based on gender. The boys are generally more comfortable with and interested in the play of boys, and girls are more comfortable with and interested in the play of girls. There’s plenty of overlap, but there’s enough difference that its a ubiquitous phenomenon. And you see it happen in nature, among other mammal species, all the time.

So what drives them back together, not one by one through individual means and connections, but as a whole group, as a herd? What brings these diverging halves of the species back together? What could possibly bring these two groups that are so different they could almost be considered separate subspecies (and have in fact, separate genetic lineages) back to reform into one species instead of just going their own way? What could overcome all the fear, confusion, disinterest, disgust, prejudice, lack of understanding, cultural differences, physical and emotional mismatching, and the cooties?

Sexual maturity. Adolescence, the transformation into sexually mature members of the species lights the fire that brings us back together. Just as it does for so many species. Our need to recombine to continue the species drives us back together. It lights the fire under us. Men, especially, might remain half socialized nitwit after hitting adolescence, if it weren’t for the fact they feel driven back to the female half of the species and feel driven to impress them and cater to their desires, to sculpt themselves and the world for women in some way that will impress them and invite acceptance.

And so I wonder, how much interest would men take in women if they didn’t have such a desperate need and desire for them and their affections? The excessive imbalance in how much men feel driven by that need has been well observed and documented, if not well publicized. Everyone knows it by experience, and any time anyone has set out to study it the results are almost laughably easy to come by, and remain more consistent across time and culture (and even different species) than almost any sociological phenomenon you discover. The driving force of testosterone doesn’t just drive sexual intersest and physical strength, it’s a major source of male energy and ambition and drive and tenacity. Ask a man who has had his testosterone wiped out by prostate cancer treatments how he feels and he’s likely to break down in tears and tell you he feels he’s lost who he is.

So how sustainable would relationships across the sexes be if you took away sexual attraction and prejudicial interest and regard? What would it look like if men stopped being men and stopped seeing women as women? One possible place to look for the answer is to look at the relationships between gay men and lesbians. As much as they have worked together to support mutual causes, there is actual little community or regard between them. They have very little use for one another and tend to self segregate into their own separate enclaves, much like the children did. You rarely see them together, of their own accord. Without the need to reunite the species for intersex propagation, they remain apart and go their separate ways, happy in their own worlds, with no need for the other.

Men who have started having affairs, or couples who have become physically distant are another example. It’s very hard for men to invest emotionally apart from a physical investments. The physical investment does a huge amount of work in securing and developing their physical attachment.

I’ll be perfectly honest about myself, I’ve had a haircut that also included a really good neck massage. And it was hard not to fall a little bit in love with my hairdresser, for no better reason than that she was young, lovely, and showed great physical kindness to me. It’s very hard for a man not to fall just a little in love for such small reasons. Women seem to have a greater power to resist such deductions, even from their own partners they carry less weight. But different kinds of kindness, generosity, and regard can impress them. Both men and women greatly appreciate generosity, albeit they tend to get more from different types of generous behavior. The thought that, as a modern man, it won’t harm your first impressions if you don’t pick up the check or if you display any kind of cheapness on a first date, is a sadly misguided one.

There are a lot of huge prejudices women don’t like to admit they have that shape the relations between the sexes. In fact humans are the only species of the large primates in which male selection exists. Among all the others in our class, the females are very selective, and the males compete among themselves for the right to be the accepted winner of their affections.

Human females can be quite picky. For example, they will only very rarely choose a mate who is younger than them, and almost never someone who is shorter than them. They will almost never choose a mate below their own social and financial status. Women marry across and up, with extreme prejudice. And if a man falls down below their status, they are not very understanding.

Apart from the question of how much women would be interested in or have society with women without sex, there is a second, possibly just as big a question of how much human and social effort men would engage in without women. Looking at frontier situations like the old west and college apartments, the emergence of anything remotely resembling civilization and the niceties of society hardly ever seems to emerge except insofar as men are attempting to prepare the space to be acceptable to women. And in many of the old west town it was, interestingly enough, the prostitutes, the first women in those areas who demanded and founded a large part of the social development of those places (schools, care, sanitation, social services, legal and behavioral standards, cultural institutions, art all those little niceties that make up, you know, civilization).

If there were no demand on the part of women that men make themselves and their environments meet their standards for cohabitation, would men develop these things of their own accord? Would they develop themselves? Possibly. But likely to a far lesser degree and at a far slower rate. How much have we all done just to make our mothers proud? How much to win the attention of girls, how much to win the approval of our spouses.

Looking at the current trend in our society, with rates of marriage falling and less investment in the opposite sex in general expected, especially long-term investment, what have some of the outcomes been? Are men still bothering to improve themselves and their environment as much? Or are the becoming more and more pathetic with no standard to be held to? With pornography easily available for substitutionary pleasure, what is their motivation for subjecting either themselves or the world to the difficult process of taming and maturity and conversion to productivity?

I lose tolerance for differences when not having sex. Sex is a reminder, an illustration that somehow, despite our difference we fit together.

I think the crux of the problem is, considering that men are more aggressive, less sociable, less agreeable, less concerned with others in general for many essential structurao reasons, if you take away sex as a motivator for pushing them back into connection with humanity, particularly with that part of humanity they really need to balance and tame their more aggressive virtues and make them productive, what is the likely result? I’m not as sociable or even socially needy as my wife. So if I genuinely lost interest in sex, if that motivator toward her was gone, there would be a lot less energy in me to drive my investment in the relationship. I don’t feel like I need other people or need to care about other people that much. But sex makes me care. I don’t think women care more purely for some abstract altruistic reason either, there are biological and instinctive motivators there too, just different expressions.

I think the main result of a loss of interest in sex would simply be a growing indifference about women and the concerns of women and the challenge of interacting with women in general. Unfortunately, indifference is one of those traits that make serious relationships like marriage extremely hard to maintain. And let’s be honest, society in a broader level, the species, is a marriage between the sexes. And as hard as sex can be, without it it isn’t clear that the marriage between the sexes could survive the resulting indifference.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, this. It’s not like humans are ignorant of the natural world. If you asked any biologist, what would happen to a species if they stopped being interested in sex, the answer would be, that would be the end of the species in every sense. Many of its behaviors and social structures, except possibly feeding, would cease, and in short order so would the whole species.

In fact that’s one of the reasons pandas are so darn hard to keep from going extinct. They don’t seem to be very motivated to keep pandas going themselves. Mating programs are notoriously difficult, and the amount of effort required to get a species to procreate who doesn’t seem to care about it much is very high.

Without the abstract motivation of sex, birds wouldn’t sing or have bright colors or perform extravagant displays. The magnificent size and horns of bulls wouldn’t exist, and neither would the udders and rich milk of cows. The colorful backsides of baboons would cease to glow, and the structure of their troops would disintegrate. Deer wouldn’t bother growing horns and elk would cease bugling. Salmon wouldn’t bother making their annual run. Mayflies wouldn’t waste their lives for the few short hours of flight it takes to mate. Plants wouldn’t waste energy on producing flowers. Bower birds wouldn’t make their nests and lyre birds wouldn’t bother making their complex songs. Flamingos wouldn’t dance. Bighorn sheep wouldn’t bother with the big horns. Elephant seals wouldn’t bother mastering any beaches or need to be elephantine. Bees wouldn’t need queens. Whales wouldn’t bother with heat runs. Rays wouldn’t leap from the waves. Innumerable birds and fish and mammals wouldn’t waste time on their migrations to their mating grounds. Stallions and rams wouldn’t bother protecting their herds.

In other words, apart from the end of all complex life and society (even animal societies, which isn’t nothing), all the color would go out of the world. So much of what is wild and amazing and wonderful would cease to be. So much of the character of life would be lost. So before we’re ready to dispose of something that has given us so much, given us everything, because it has also given us some bad things, we might want to hesitate. Maybe eliminating a systemically corrupt evil would actually deprive us of one of our most essential mechanisms for good. Maybe our concern should be excellence and good management rather than rejection and disillusionment. I think we need to be careful what we wish for.