Traditionalist commentator Frederica Mathewes-Green (formerly an Episcopalian, now Orthodox) makes some trenchant points about the after-effects of the sexual revolution in an essay in Touchstone magazine. Excerpts (with extra paragraphing added):
Everything you hear in ads and entertainment is telling you that your goal is to wake up next to someone gorgeous tomorrow morning. That’s the rationale of consumer sex.
But I think what humans really want is to wake up next to someone kind, fifty years from tomorrow morning. The decisions you make today, and tomorrow—and tomorrow night—will have everything to do with whether that happens for you or not.
It happened for me. I have been married thirty-one years, and until the end of my life I’ll have beside me the man who fell in love with me when I was nineteen. If I get old and cranky, if I get breast cancer, if I get Alzheimer’s, he’ll stick with me, and I won’t be alone, and I’ll do the same for him.
In this way we show the presence of God to each other, and grow into his likeness.
* * *
My generation … thought we would always be the younger generation. We thought we’d always set the standard for what it means to be sexy and gorgeous.
We made fun of old married people, the ones who got hitched, settled down, had kids, had mortgages, and thirty years later were having old-married-people sex with each other.
It turns out that, even if you make fun of people like that, you still get old anyway.
The alternative is not staying young forever; the alternative is being just as old, and not having formed any lasting relationship, and going to bed most nights by yourself.
You’re not having old-married-people sex; you’re not having sex with anybody
(Hat tip to TitusOneNine.)
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