A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Young people – marry a virgin April 1, 2014

Before I begin this post, I must warn you that it will have a great deal of vulgar language as a matter of course.  No cussing, but just typical cultural words for intimate matters.  This post will not discuss sin necessarily, save as an aside to the ongoing cultural collapse.  It’s a bit off-topic for what I typically write nowadays, but I think it important to post.

This may be a hot topic, or completely mundane, I don’t know.  I fell into reading some really disturbing accounts of the mating scene among “millenials,” or, say, those roughly 18-30.  I say mating scene, instead of dating, as there essentially isn’t much dating anymore, just base animal rutting of the lowest sort.  Not that dating is ideal, anyway, courting is much more virtuous and apt to aid one in finding that one special person much better.

I saw a link last week that went to a post wherein a 32 year old Indian woman, self-described as very attractive, fit, highly educated, and highly paid, lamented the fact that now that she was done partying and engaging in no-strings sex, she couldn’t find a traditional Indian man to settle down with.  They all, in a sense, viewed her as “damaged goods.”  Oh, I should add, this woman, admitting 18 sex partners in her past, felt she was rather prim and proper compared to her friends, who had many more.  And this is not at all unusual for that age cohort, and in fact seems to be getting much, much worse as time goes by and the cultural collapse advances.  A priest related to me recently a group of high school girls in the Atlanta area who all had literally dozens, if not hundreds, of partners by the time they were 15 or 16.

There has always been a tendency among men to be pigs in matters of sex.  But women are rapidly descending to that same piggish level – or perhaps even exceeding it.  Feminism, instead of lifting women up, has encouraged them to ape the very worst characteristics in men.  This aping, however, is incredibly destructive, and will virtually insure that marriage, as the foundational institution of society, continues its sad fall into oblivion.

When it comes to marriage, most men do not seek in their wife a woman who has had many and varied sexual experiences and partners. Most men, in fact, would strongly prefer a woman who is innocent when it comes to such matters, and gives indication of virtue.  This  preference is more or less just part of most men’s makeup, it’s not even a conscious choice, in most cases.  But if men somehow get wind that a woman has been around the block a few times, they are much less likely to be interested in her for “marriage material.”  They’ll be happy to be the umpteenth notch on her bedpost, but not marry her.

And probably, quite rightly so.  I actually covered the data below in a post three years ago, but things just keep getting worse out there, and my blog had  tiny readership back then.  Now, it’s a bit bigger, and I think this data deserves to be seen.

The below is a graph that shows the correlation between lifetime likelihood to divorce and the number of partners a woman has had.  Since women initiate divorce anywhere from 70-90% of the time, this correlation is a very strong predictor of future divorce rates.  And the data is most grim:

Source.  This actually two sets of data on one graph.  The green bars are the result of a Heritage study on correlation between divorce and number of lifetime partners, and that data was normalized to make it appear better than the reality.  The “Teachman” data is the blue lines overlaid, which shows a minimum divorce risk for a woman with at least ONE out of marriage lifetime sex partner of over 50%, and a maximum risk of 90%. And this is only 10 year divorce risk!  The base Heritage study, which I can’t find online anymore but recall from 3  years ago, actually showed, for a lifetime period, that women with 15 or more partners have essentially a 100% divorce rate, but the sample population was small so they revised the rate downwards to over 80%.  Not good, at any rate.

I can also say that while this data above shows a ~20% lifetime divorce rate even for those who were virgins when married, when religious practice and prayer life are factored in, that number drops to essentially zero.  Not completely zero, there are oddball cases now and then, but the rate is around 1-3%.

Now, if you couple the fact that women initiate divorce in the vast majority of cases, and the fact that even ONE sex partner outside marriage radically increases the likelihood of divorce……it is plain that men’s biological preference for virgin brides is not just rooted in some patriarchal bias, but in both self-preservation and the best interest of offspring.

One more bit of data, there is a strong but lesser correlation for men between lifetime partners and divorce rate. I blogged the data below here years ago, but here is a graph that shows lower correlation for lifetime partners and divorce for men, than for women:

The first study is really a lot stronger than the second one, I would tend to accept it’s data over the latter data where they diverge.  Nevertheless, we see that the truism holds for men, as well: having a partner outside your marriage radically increases your chances for future divorce.  Not quite to the same degree, but very substantially.  In fact, involvement in pre-marital sexual relationships is the single strongest individual predictor of lifetime divorce.

None of this is to pick on women, per se’.  But historically, women have been the main societal guardians of virtue, especially when it comes to matters related to the marital act. Historically, women “policed” themselves by maintaining standards of expected behavior woman-to-woman, which had the effect of increasing virtue and making obtaining sex a matter of commitment for men.  Feminism and other cultural calamities have managed to undermine that beneficial “peer pressure” to the extent it hardly exists today, and the “price” for men for sex has collapsed.  At the same time, there seems something innate in women that makes their suitability for a lifetime commitment also collapse if they have had even a few flings outside marriage.

So, if I could give one critical advice to a young man or woman contemplating a vocation to the married state, it is that they do all they can to insure that both they and their spouse are virgins.  This is obviously not an easy thing to check up on, but there are certain indicators you can look to without even having to ask a very uncomfortable question.

Look to those who practice modesty and all the virtues.  Find a young man or woman interested not in dating, but in courting, particularly with familial oversight.  If you happen to fall into a heated moment, and your dating/courting partner is making demands that are inappropriate, that’s a very bad sign. Get away.  If they seem to know a great deal about intimate matters and/or what they want in such, that’s another warning sign. Avoid those whose parents are divorced, that is another very strong indicator of future divorce risk. Avoid the worldly, and both weak or non-Catholics.  Most of all, though, stick with the most faithful, pious souls you can find, who not only practice virtue themselves but whose parents and family does so…….that’s the best possible place to start.

If all this sounds very old-fashioned and traditional, it’s meant to.  Numerous separate cultures around the world developed, over time, elaborate safeguards to defend marriage and the family.  Christendom had by far the best of those. It may sound horribly passe’ and even dumb to recommend the kind of courting seen below with strong familial involvement to insure no temptation arises to sin, but this kind of traditional courtship was really ordered to maximizing not only the security and lifetime happiness of the courtiers, but it also played a vital role in safeguarding the institutions of marriage and child-raising.

But we all know those safeguards have been deliberately destroyed, and enormous misery has resulted. Don’t fall into the trap yourself.  Be continent. Be chaste.  Avoid temptation.  For Heaven’s sake, never get started with pr0n, it will screw you up immensely, it will be a miracle if it doesn’t mess you up terminally.