Sex and the Meaning of Marriage

Having just come back from my sister's bridal shower, and in anticipation of her upcoming wedding, I have been thinking a lot about how and why we celebrate the marriage customs that we do and what significance they hold for how we plan not just for our weddings, but for our marriages.

What seems especially striking to me as I come away from this weekend of celebration is the integral role friends and family play in slowly and winsomely drawing the betrothed couple into the larger community through various wedding traditions over the course of an engagement. Take the bridal shower, for example. This seemingly superficial party actually reflects rather profound truths about what a bride (and groom) will need within marriage. By gathering just women together to celebrate with the bride, it affirms the need for both bride and groom to have gender-specific friendships to rely upon as they navigate the sometimes universal and sometimes specific gender gaps that inevitably emerge within marriage. It also defines the woman and man as having unique needs, unique interests, and unique desires for marriage.

More profoundly, the bridal shower is often the first stage of an engagement in which a couple's anticipated sexual union becomes something that is marked with communal significance. Never have I been to a bridal shower where sex was "off-the-table", so to speak. To the contrary, it is often a common topic of conversation as older and presumably wiser women ask questions, share advice, joke, offer encouragement, and testify that sex - while private and intimate - also has public implications. There is often talk of babies, for instance.

With these thoughts and observations in mind I offer this thoughtful and instructive piece by Jennifer Roback Morse who explores the meaning of sex not only within marriage but for society. While this piece generally speaks of marriage as a policy question(which is undoubtedly a controversial approach) the principles and guidelines she offers for helping us understand marriage as a question of human sexuality rather than a question of contractual allowances is a constructive framework, I believe.

As she writes:
Many people celebrate the uncoupling of sexual activity from both of its natural functions, procreation and spousal unity. But by doing so, we have capsized the whole natural order of sexuality. Instead of being an engine of sociability and community building, sex has become a consumer good. Instead of being something that draws us out of ourselves and into relationship with others, our sexual activity focuses us inward, on ourselves and our own desires. A sexual partner is not a person to whom I am irrevocably connected by bonds of love. Rather, the sexual partner has become an object that satisfies me more or less well.

She is speaking of the broad societal view of sexuality here, of course, yet it is this observation that causes me to reflect on how stark the contrast is that we can see when marriage and traditional customs insist on a different reality. The bridal shower forces, at least in a small way, the undoing of this commonly held notion that sex is ultimately a private affair. We have showers, in part, to remind the bride that her decision to be married, and thus to be sexual, touches a larger community. And while the community is obviously not entering into her bedroom in a literal sense, it is asserting itself as an entity that has borne witness to her and her husband's covenant . It will hold the couple accountable to others. It will celebrate in their union and in their children. It will provide support when that same sexual life or union creates shame or deep hurt or disappointment. Ultimately, as she goes on to say, it is not government or economics that can reshape our understanding of sexuality,but community alone that has the power to give us a fuller understanding:

...we have already redefined the social context of marriage in the name of equality for women. But equality is a political concept. Rights and entitlements are the vocabulary of politics. By contrast, human sexuality is about gift and gratitude: the mutual gift of self to one's partner, the gift of life that results, and the gratitude tinged with awe that is the only reasonable response to both. Using political concepts, such as equality or freedom, to describe marriage obscures this crucial connection between sex and gift.

Anyway... this is a poor summary but that's why there's a link. Check it out. :)