Yet (while I don't agree with everything in the book) it really is a winner because it forces us to think critically about sex and fidelity and the forces that attempt to distract us from thinking truly about our sexuality. Winner recently addressed Calvin College in it's January series on the topic: "The Truth About Married Sex." Her talk is an expansion of a topic in the aforementioned book, and well worth a listen. Below is a quotation from the book that will give you a flavor of the lecture:
Premarital Sex: It Teaches You that Sex Is Thrilling
The main story our society tells about non-marital sex is that it's exciting. Indeed, "exciting" and "thrilling" are among the adjectives our popular culture most frequently attaches to sex. And premarital sex can be exciting. Folks who are in the dating pool cannot assume they are going to have sex every night, or every week. Sex isn't regular. It isn't ordinary. To the contrary, it is dramatic. Sometimes it is dramatic because it is bound up with the thrill of the chase-this is the drama of the much-touted college "hook-up." You get all gussied up and go to a party and you have a goal: to attract that cute man with the long eyelashes. Flirting is exciting. Knowing someone finds you attractive feels good. Not knowing the outcome — Will he or won't he? Does she or doesn't she? — can be thrilling.
Sometimes premarital sex feels dramatic because, by definition, it is part of a relationship that is itself not wholly stable. Even when you've been dating someone for a year, the lack of" permanence that fundamentally characterizes your relationship can add a certain frisson to everything you do with that person, from going on a Saturday hike to smooching on the sofa. Everything in your relationship gets some of its charge from the uncertainty, the unknown: put negatively, it gets its charge from the instability; put more generously, it gets its charge from the possibility.
This may be the single most significant way that married sex differs from unmarried sex. Married sex does not derive its thrill from the possibility of the unknown. Married sex is a given. It is solemnized and marked in ritual. It is established. It is governed by vows. It becomes a ritual in itself; it becomes a routine.
The sex of blind dates and fraternity parties, even of relatively long-standing dating relationships, has, simply, no normal qualities. Based principally on mutual desire, it dispenses with the ordinary rhythms of marital sex, trading them for a seemingly thrilling but ultimately false story. This may be the way that the sin of premarital sex sticks with us most lastingly; it may be the twisted lesson it teaches us most convincingly: that sex is exciting. That sex derives its thrill from instability and drama. In fact, the opposite is true: the dramas of married sex are smaller and more intimate, and indeed it is the stability of marriage that allows sex to be what it is.…
[So] There's nothing inherently wrong with married couples fostering a little romance. There's nothing wrong with the husband who buys his wife some lingerie or lights a few candles in the bedroom. The problem comes before that-it comes in a set of premarital sexual experiences that foster the expectation that sex will be constantly exciting, that it will be thrilling the way instability is almost always thrilling, the way walking on a rope bridge across a gorge can be thrilling. The problem comes when we learn to define excitement by instability's terms, to connect sexuality and desire with that instability, instead of teaching us to find it in the stable, daily-and yes, occasionally dull-rhythms of marriage. [pp. 118-20.]
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