Culture and technology have combined to proliferate all the worst parts of human nature. The exhibit this post focuses on is the nexus of male lust and female hypergamy.
Male lust: obvious. Female hypergamy: women prefer the same small group of high quality men. The modern situation pours gasoline over a fire by enabling these two groups to have sex with one another at frequencies not possible without shameless promiscuity, birth control, and antibiotics.
This psychologist says 20% of women under 30 are living a polygamous lifestyle. What he means is that 20% of women under 30 have more than one sexual partner in a given year, and statistically speaking, these men are sleeping with more than two women per year. He focuses on the women because there are more women sleeping with men than the reverse, as has been well documented.
I think his statistics are far too conservative. I have heard more firsthand accounts of body counts in the double and triple digits to make me sick for the rest of my life. One such account was of a lady who was so devastated from her breakup with her first boyfriend that she decided to sleep with five men she'd never met before inside a week. This is the emotional equivalent of strapping explosives to your heart and setting it off. Immediately after this, she began a fast descent into suicidal tendencies, medicated depression, and failure at work and school. Another account was of a lady who, for over a year, would visit a bar on her way home from work and bring a different man home several times a week.[1] For a year. This is something you see on a daily basis when you interact with this age group. It's really that bad. But this post is not about these cases, which are far more common today than you probably would have ever imagined. But this post is not about the consequences of egregious promiscuity, but the cost of "just a little" promiscuity.
I'll leave it to you to look at the statistics. They are well measured and not hard to find. Luckily, they are becoming more prominent. Unfortunately, it's leading to a mass exodus from the dating market, mostly among men, and not just the low quality ones. This is requiring women to take on much greater responsibility in finding potential partners for marriage than they have ever had to before, and it is going to get a lot worse.
I want to focus on two facets of this from a spiritual level.
Principles
There are many people who have very strong feelings against polygamy. I tend to agree with them in almost all cases. My question is this: are you as outspoken against polygamy without the protections of marriage as you are polygamy with the protections of marriage?
Being married to more than one person is illegal in every state, as far as I have heard. But you can have uncommitted sex with as many people as you want without any legal consequences (so long as you prevent a baby from being born, including through murdering it before it exits the womb).
The serious spiritual consequences of promiscuity
The spiritual consequences of sexual choices are astronomical, yet never discussed. Not really. No matter how strong the language used by churches, I have yet to hear anyone get near the actual gravity of the situation.
One reason for this is that no one has yet to explain what actually caused the fall of Adam and Eve. God has taught me many things about this, but I will not use this post to reveal those things.
For now, suffice it to say the following facts:
- When a man and a woman have sex, a spiritual bond is created. This bond is not broken until the death of one of the two people. This bond does not occur in same-sex sexual encounters. Many people have noticed this. You can google phrases like "soul ties" and hear their views about it. In ancient times, marriage was not consummated by a ceremony, but by the sexual act. Once a marriage was consummated, it could not be broken by the decisions of humans. This is because the union was binding for life through a very real but unseen process that permanently bonded the two people until one died. This is the reason for the content of the marriage laws under the law of Moses and later in the New Testament (e.g. anyone who marries a woman who is divorced but whose husband is still living is committing adultery).
- Men and women experience this bond differently, both in the single experience and in plurality. For women, the effects of this bond degrade significantly with each partner, with the largest decline after the first. Men can experience the bond several times before it degrades. This pattern is supported by mainstream scientific research tracking happiness and longevity of relationships by number of sexual partners.
- There is also a bond that is formed with "merely" serious (but non-sexual) relationships. The same pattern exists with men and women as the physical bond. This is also supported by mainstream scientific research, though it is so unpopular that you'll have to search for it under different headings. The point: you can be a virgin physically and still have a heart that is vastly less capable of loving compared to your first love.
Selling yourself for a thing of naught
It is very sad to me that the men and women living this way choose to do so. It is obvious that they have no idea of the consequences of their actions. It is also obvious that the women making these choices do not realize how skewed the cost/benefit is for them compared to the men.
Women stand to gain much more out of marriage and children than men. It is much easier for men to find greater fulfillment outside of family than women. Men can experience more relationships with less likelihood of damage than women.
Men and women need to value themselves more than this. They need to prize what has great worth. If you knew the value of a bond between a righteous man and woman who had prepared for the full potential of a marriage relationship, you would say far stronger things about this than anything I'm saying here. And you'd feel devastatingly bad if you've chosen anything less than that.
What to do about all of this
Honestly, there really are only two things that we can do about this.
First, fix ourselves. If you are too young to have made these mistakes, you need to highly value emotional (not just physical) chastity. Don't date for fun. Date to find a spouse. Do not go on a date with someone you wouldn't marry. Stop dating someone the moment you find a dealbreaker that would prevent you from marrying them. If you have made mistakes, honestly admit them, turn from them, and live the best we can given the choices we've made.
Second, we need to boldly and plainly teach these things to our children (if we are old enough to have them) and teach them to our peers if we are still young enough to have friends who can benefit from this knowledge. One important piece of this is to help young people understand that these are among the set of decisions that one cannot fix the consequences of in this life. You ought to look at being in a relationship with someone who has not kept emotional (not just physical) chastity the same way you would someone with a terminal disease: you know you are signing up for far less than the ideal situation, and there is no way to fix that. If it is a sacrifice you choose, that's great. But don't fool yourself into thinking you are some saint who doesn't care, because I promise you that you won't understand what you are signing up for until years down the road, when it is far too late for you to repent for what you now are very likely to strongly regret.
Good luck with this. When you speak about topics that incriminate people for things in which they previously felt justified, you are walking into a hail of bullets.
[1] - Why are both of these examples of women? Because this behavior is vastly more common among women than men. Not because the nature of women is worse, but because men's standards are lower. Most women are not interested in most men. A woman inclined to promiscuity has a far easier job fulfilling her lust than a man with the same. A lustful man has to be among the top 20% or so to sleep with as many women as he wants to. A lustful woman just needs a pulse. I have had the misfortune of meeting many women like this, and to date, zero men. But they do exist!