The Catholic Register’s regular columnist, Andrea Mrozek, recently published the book I...Do? Why Marriage Still Matters, co-written with Peter Jon Mitchell, Cardus program director for family. Here is an edited excerpt. 

Volumes have been written on the consequences associated with unconstrained sexual freedom. Few would contest a breakdown of the relationship between the sexes. Apps intended to facilitate dating do anything but. 

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Younger and younger people are seeing violent porn, which often makes its way into physical encounters, mostly without any clear consent and changing relationships—not for the better. For a culture in which we claim sex is free and accessible, research shows we are having less of it. 

This being true, it comes as little surprise that a more vocal opposition to unconstrained sexuality in the formative lives of young adults is emerging. Take Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex: A Provocation (2022), Louise Perry’s The Case against the Sexual Revolution (2022), and Mary Harrington’s Feminism against Progress (2023). All make the case that unconstrained sexuality is playing a negative role and raising consequences for many. Once again, it would seem there is no such thing as a free lunch. Rather, there are trade-offs to the various choices we make. 

There are many different ways to be labeled as crazy. But what could certainly warrant the adjective is a worldview in which sex is the equivalent of a hobby or a sports activity rather than one that plays an intrinsic part in a lasting relationship. Marriage, as it turns out, does more than allow for paternity to be known in sexual relations for purposes of the care of children and transfer of property. Constraining sex to marriage also places guardrails around this important aspect of human behavior that is so easily abused, even when a child is not the result. 

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The whole push for consent in sexual activity is a quiet acknowledgment of the need for guardrails. The lowest bar is consent—and it’s a critically important one. But there are always legal boundaries and norms we all must follow, or people get hurt. Witness the #MeToo movement as one example of the many ways in which hurts ensue out of nebulous sexual contacts. Ultimately, everyone can indeed have sex outside marriage, but many at this point may be longing for the voluntary constraints marriage furnishes, pointing relationships toward longevity and stability. 

Unconstrained sexual freedom can also look like it works for educated, upper-income-level people. Well-heeled folks have money to buffer bad decisions. But the lack of marriage has been a disaster for lower-income echelons. Rob Henderson expands on this at length in his book Troubled. Henderson coined the term luxury beliefs, which are beliefs that the wealthy can afford to hold but of which the poor suffer the consequences. Even so, the upper classes tend to talk left but walk right, meaning that even as they advance progressive notions in theory, they are more likely to get married and have children within marriage. 

Increasingly, feminists are noting that the sexual revolution broke down marriage but in so doing offered nothing in its stead. Biological realities that cannot be eradicated make sex a consequential act, one that is more happily engaged in with boundaries around it precisely because, even in an age of modern birth control, conception after sex cannot be ruled out. 

Today, unconstrained sexuality means relationships often start with sex. While data do not show that premarital sex leads to the poor choice of a marriage partner, we do know that multiple premarital sexual partners is a predictor for divorce. Our culture suggests it’s important to start relationships 

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in bed rather than, say, with budgeting, but this reflects the rise of sexual revolution values and the diminished marriage culture we now share. For too many it doesn’t matter whether the sexual contact lasts, and it is likewise easy to believe that sex is the start of emotional bonding rather than the culmination of it. C. S. Lewis once called sex outside marriage a “monstrosity” (something unnatural or misshapen). He did not do so because it doesn’t follow Christian theology or rules, but because those who engage in sex outside marriage “are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union.” 

(Copyright Cascade Books, November 2024)