The biological and economic truth that underpins the invention and continual re-invention of marriage includes three harsh, unromantic facts that put pressure on spouses with children every day:
Truth #1
Men and women make babies and then have to take care of them and educate them for many years before the babies can become productive members of a community.
Truth #2
The societies in which married couples and their children live cannot afford to support children of deadbeat parents, so spouses are under constant legal and financial pressure to stay married and to take care of their own.
Truth #3
When it comes to biological and economic issues, children, the marketplace and society don’t care a whit about romantic love, soul mates, larger purposes or whether a couple is “getting along”. Instead, they insist spouses shut up and take care of their responsibilities because they don’t want the economic burden to be shifted to them, i.e., shotgun weddings.
This means that marriage is a public concern, and not a private one.
Marriage is driven into existence, and supported legally, for the benefit of society and not individual spouses or couples.
In other words, society gives rise to marriage and insists on its existence so it is not burdened by the children married couples produce. Marriage isn’t private. It’s everyone’s business, which is why dignity matters so much to married couples.
If couples want a private relationship, all they need to do is live together and avoid having children. Only then will society leave them alone legally.
If girls become pregnant without a spouse to help them take care of the baby, the community in which they live faces both moral and economic dilemmas. And most can’t handle the economic ones.
On the one hand, community members and families want to avoid having a baby suffer or die because of a lack of care.
On the other hand, they usually lack the economic resources to take care of the baby themselves because people’s resources are always limited, and usually insufficient to even take care of themselves.
As a consequence of these moral and economic pressures, societies and families invent marriage, which requires spouses to stand up publicly and make commitments to each other in front of the community to take care of their own marriage concerns. This enables the community to avoid the costs of unwed girls and gain the economic advantage of a thriving and productive family.
Because biological and economic concerns begin with sex and having babies, and because people are so crazy about their craziness about sex, we pay considerable attention to this set of intertwined, but different, concerns — companionship, intimacy and sex.
Distinctions for Companionship, Intimacy and Sex
We combine the concerns of companionship, intimacy and sex and distinguish them from each other at the same time for three reasons.
First, all three are fundamental to all of our actions as a couple. Twenty-four hours a day, no matter where our spouse or we are located, we are always acting with and for the sake of these three concerns simultaneously. Certainly, they take different forms at different times throughout the day, or throughout decades of marriage, but all three are always in play.
Second, they are different skills. Each one is a different orientation towards our spouse and ourselves.
Third, we cannot act for the sake of any of these in a way that isolates them from the other two. Any action we take in one immediately affects the others.
What is companionship?
Companionship is a skill and like any skill, it needs to be learned and practiced in order for people to become effective performers.
Companionship is the skill of being a companion in different domains of concerns and actions. It is the skill of being a partner who helps another take care of their concerns, whatever those concerns might be. This may include just “being” with one’s spouse to keep them company. But it also includes acting to help them take care of their concerns and/or having resources to contribute, such as knowledge, networks, time, energy, money and opportunities.
It is the skill of being and acting with people, especially one’s spouse, to produce a situation that they view as a contribution to their capacity to live a good life. It is a skill both spouses need in order to care for most other concerns. As with any skill, it requires an interpretation by an observer who can make effective assessments of practice and execution.
Companionship needs to be practiced and learned over and over again as our practices for work, career, membership in the community and play, among other practices, change over time.
Companionship is always part of shared action to take care of some other concern. Companionship, like tennis, can’t be played without someone else to play with. That is, companionship does not exist in isolation. A couple can only be companions when they are working together for the sake of some other concern.
In a rapidly changing culture, with bodies that change over time (age), and with our family always changing as well, companionship is a skill we must practice and continually reinvent.
The moment we stop practicing learning to be a better companion, we start being a worse one. As with so many other skills, hovering or having arrived somewhere doesn’t cut it.
Companionship is part of our journey together. It is part of our Work of Art in Progress.
What is intimacy?
Intimacy is an individual skill — one that we actually practice with ourselves. We don’t need our spouse to experience intimacy but many spouses don’t know this, which can be confusing and produce unnecessary dissatisfaction.
We are “intimate” when we feel as though we have a very close personal relationship with someone, feel friendly and concerned about them, are interested in their well-being, and may or may not have sexual relations with them.
But notice that intimacy does not require that the other person share the same feelings, interpretations or point of view. In fact, feelings of intimacy are easily produced with people, animals, tools and natural objects, such as trees, mountains or sunsets that don’t even know we exist.
To be intimate with people, we don’t need them around. In fact, they can be dead, as we see with those who have an intimate relationship with Elvis Presley. All we need to be intimate with anything is the personal responsibility to feel that way.
We cannot deny, however, that in the domain of marriage we don’t just practice intimacy in isolation. We also practice it with our spouses, but this isn’t required.
When we are married, we are always in the linguistic environment of our spouses because of our vows, even when we are not in their physical presence.
Often we need our spouse’s help, cooperation and coordination in order to experience intimacy with them, our children, nature or any other endeavor. With intimacy, we need the help of our spouses, and we need the skill to help our spouses.
Intimacy requires time and space for reflection, peace of mind, settlement in life and a mood of serenity at least in the moment. The pace of our lives, the velocity of change around us, and our anxiety about taking care require we put attention on taking care of our need for intimacy.
Although we don’t produce intimacy for one another, as we do companionship, we need to include this concern for our self and our spouse as we live and work together. A three-minute conversation in the midst of a busy day is a perfect time to include intimacy. We have to be good enough companions to make it possible.
What is sex?
Sex, sex, sex. We are sex. It is part of who we are 24 hours a day. And because it is part of who we are, it runs us. We cannot control or suppress sexual thoughts and reactions; we are always crazy about sex. This is guaranteed.
One of the most confusing aspects of sex is that it is both ontogenic and phylogenic.
When sex is ontogenic it is part of our personal life and we have some degree of control over its existence or our participation in the domain. We experience and learn how to have sex during our lifetime. Our thoughts, feelings, wants, wishes, desires and preferences matter. We can be responsible for our sexual actions to some degree.
But, when sex is phylogenic it is part of our species’ survival. We inherit our sexuality and sex drive. It doesn’t belong to “us” in this sense, but that doesn’t stop our bodies from becoming horny and driving us to have sex whether we want to or not. The phylogenic aspect of our sexuality produces enormous mischief in our marriages and contributes to our craziness about it because it (our horniness) drives us, and we don’t always know what to do about that.
In this way, sex is a bit like breathing. In some instances, we are in charge of our breathing, which is comforting and reassuring to our sense of being in charge. We can control it to some extent. But if we hold our breath too long or find ourselves in a situation where we cannot breathe for too long, we quickly discover that our body just takes over and drives us to breathe whether we want to or not.
The same is true about sex.
Crazy about sex? Sure. Of course. Who isn’t?
Crazy about your craziness?
That’s cultural and not such a good thing for marriage.
The problem we observe in our culture today with sex in marriage is that we are crazy about our craziness about sex. This is cultural, unnecessary and counter-productive to marriage, where sex, or making and raising babies, is a fundamental concern, and horniness never stops permanently. We don’t talk about sex. We react to our craziness about it.
Not only are we prudish about sex, we are also in the midst of all sorts of changes regarding sex, from birth control to sexually transmitted diseases to exposure from the media to different philosophies and practices in the domain of sex.
At the same time, our marriage vows appropriately lock us into a monogamous relationship, which means we only have one partner with whom to satisfy a great many of our sexual concerns.
To make the situation even more complicated, men and women, as well as different individuals, live with different concerns regarding sex.
In our judgment, sex is too complex for any spouse to figure out academically or intellectually.
We need a fundamental background of understanding to produce wisdom and guide action, but beyond that, we just need to go for the ride, because we are going to go anyway.
The only question is whether we will enjoy the ride and the different outcomes along the way.
Rather than approach sex with intellectual understanding or an attempt to map the domain, we say that sex is a dance we need to perform with our spouse, forever, and with enthusiasm. The dancers change over time as the Selves change.
Moods and desires around sex change just as our taste for food and dining experiences change. The music changes from time to time and, therefore, so must our dancing together in the domain of sex, but never our enthusiasm for it.
The music never stops, though, nor does the dance of sex with our spouse. Our conclusion is that we need to become less crazy about our craziness and just get good at the dance.
More about Companionship, Intimacy and Sex Together
More about Companionship
Companionship is a skill that both spouses must have. It is the skill of being a good mate, a good partner in life, or a good friend. We are companions for our spouse’s intimacy and sex requests and need to be the best companions we can be because of our vows and reciprocal vows.
In marriage, spouses need to be passionate companions in every effort to take care of marriage’s most fundamental concerns.
In order for our marriages to work, to be meaningful and to have the power to fulfill ambitions, we need to be skillful companions for our spouses. We need to be good friends, good playmates, good members of the household, good sexual companions and good business partners, among other skills.
The more enjoyable, relevant, valuable, powerful and satisfactory the time we spend with someone, the better our life is for us.
Companionship is part of our actions to love, honor and cherish our spouses. We do this through our willingness to join them and help them while they take care of their concerns.
We do this through the way we cooperate and coordinate our actions with them in both work and play.
A significant expression of loving, honoring and cherishing our spouse is to become skilled at being a good companion where and when our spouse wants companionship.
If one of us likes to shop and the other doesn’t, the one who doesn’t like shopping loves, honors and cherishes his or her spouse by learning to be a good companion while shopping. We recommend that the spouse who likes shopping not overwork the spouse who is trying to be a good companion.
If the other spouse likes to play golf and wants the first spouse as a companion, we urge the non-golfing spouse to learn to enjoy the game and be a good companion.
Being a good companion is not a trade, transaction or a deal between the spouses. It isn’t an “I’ll do this for you if you’ll do that for me” sort of arrangement.
Companionship is an ongoing gift we make to our spouses.
It is a way of caring for them, not a way to manipulate them to get something in return. That is not appropriate and cannot end satisfactorily.
It is not a business transaction. Transactions are for the marketplace with people with whom we have an entirely different relationship.
Companionship as a gift also needs to be deeply satisfying to the person making the gift. The where or when need not be satisfying. The gift itself is the meaning and the source of satisfaction.
One final word about companionship: Companionship opens new possibilities for learning, growing, sharing life and expanding our repertoire for participation in life.
As we get older, more powerful and more established, we are always in danger of becoming intimidating enough to others that they stop making requests or demands of us. As enticing as it might appear at first, the capacity to shut down requests that perturb us is as close to death as we can get while our body is still functioning.
Our joyful surrender to our spouse’s desires, requests and requirements can keep us moving, learning and continually perturbed or alive. Our spouse’s request for companionship is a gift in return. It keeps us stimulated, healthy, younger, stronger, flexible and happier.
Old dogs need to learn new tricks to live a good life.
More about Intimacy
Intimacy is an individual experience of being close and familiar with another. It is important to keep in mind that we require nothing from another in order to experience intimacy. But our spouse can help us. Understanding that intimacy is an individual experience locates the responsibility for producing intimacy with ourselves.
When we see that we are responsible for producing intimacy we can avoid the breakdown of requesting it from our spouse. Our spouse cannot produce our experience of intimacy. This is why, incidentally, we can feel intimate with a newborn baby who can’t do anything to produce intimacy. We can experience intimacy with practically anything, including a puppy, a dead parent, Elvis, Mother Nature or our home.
Intimacy is a moment of reflection. It is a moment in which we notice our experience of joy and love for knowing another, being part of his or her life and giving thanks for having that person be part of our own life. It is a moment for experiencing body sensations and thoughts that are inherent to our biological structure.
For most people intimacy requires a “nest of time” in which momentary safety, peace of mind and serenity about the future can live. We require a moment for our biology to be triggered and for us to experience ourselves. Our spouses can help us by being part of our environment that makes it easier.
Our spouses can be good companions in moments of intimacy, even though they can’t produce the experience for us. Some spouses like to play together by orchestrating shared moments of intimacy. They like to go to restaurants, go on vacations, or set up a gentle and peaceful environment at home to coordinate moments of mutual intimacy.
But, this is a form of play and not the essence of marriage. Intimacy is part of marriage and part of living a good life, but it is not the point of marriage. When it becomes the point, we betray other concerns and sour the marriage.
More about Sex
We need to understand sex better in order to have it make some kind of sense to us that will produce peace of mind and enable us to design effective action for including it.
We need an understanding that has it make sense in marriage, and with our needs for companionship and intimacy with our spouse, as opposed to the basic biological mechanics we learned in school or the nonsense we learned from our friends who were also “walking hormones”.
What we need for our marriage to work is an understanding of how marriage is sex, for us individually (ontogenically) as well as our species (phylogenically).
We need to understand marriage and sex in a way that reduces our craziness about our permanent and inevitable biological craziness.
Here is a little bit of our interpretation:
Marriage is sex.
If we look at the biology of our planet, we see sex is everywhere. It is what animals and plants do to reproduce, or they disappear. It consumes their energy and is the focus of action, everywhere, all the time.
If we look at human beings throughout the planet and in all times, marriage or mating to produce and care for our young is the fundamental biological component for individuals, families, communities, sovereign states and every civilization that has ever existed.
In other words, we are sex. Our marriage is sex.
No matter what we do that we think might not be sex, it can be interpreted to be connected with sex. Even if we make the case that something isn’t sex, we still are sex no matter what we do.
In other words, from a biological point of view sex is the fundamental concern of our lives (species)… so get used to it.
Get over it. Sex is the fundamental biological concern of our marriages, so get good at it, and be enthusiastic with your performance.
Learn to deal with sex skillfully and ethically so your marriage works.
Stop being crazy about being crazy about sex! And just be crazy good at it.
And, start having more fun with it. Have a lot more fun! Get on the roller coaster with your spouse and take a ride! You’re going to go anyway because that is the nature of life.
The only choice you have about sex is whether or not it is going to be enjoyable and contribute to your marriage and ambitions for living a good life. It isn’t going away.
Sex exists for us both as individuals and as part of our species.
You could say that sex, or the continuation of our species, is the fundamental concern of marriage, which means it has little or nothing to do with us as individuals. It’s as though when it comes to sex, we don’t matter, even though it is on our minds all the time. We are driven to have sex even when the results are painful suffering for everyone.
This means that sex is not important for us as individual members of the human race. This is confusing and deeply unsettling to people who believe they are in some control of their lives.
Any of us can live without sex, although that is a horrible thought to contemplate. Sex deprivation doesn’t kill us, even though many of us think we would rather be dead if it happened.
Sex exists for our species. Our species would die out without sex, which means it is part of our genetic structure, rather than our culture. We are sex.
We live consumed in a reality in which our individual concerns for survival, comfort and living a good life are all that we see. Our individual point of view blinds us to the significance of biological structures and concerns that exist for other reasons that we cannot escape.
We cannot escape them because these concerns are part of our biological structure and will not be denied.
Our concern with ourselves as individuals leaves us perplexed by the existence of our sex drive.
Our sex drive is our biological need to maintain the existence of our species.
We need to accept that our sexuality, with all of its manifestations, is part of our existence both as individuals and as part of our species. And, as with all other animals, we need to surrender to it in a way that works. If we don’t surrender and get on with it, we and our marriages suffer.
Sex is the biological distinction of male and female and all that those facts imply. It is one of the fundamental distinctions of all species of animals and plants.
As individuals, we have to deal with the biological structure that we are. We can’t do anything about it, any more than we can ignore gravity. Having sex means doing what males and females do, in all aspects of our life.
Yet, sex is more than sexual intercourse. Sex is how we relate in all domains of concern, even if we are trying to ignore it. Sex is how we look, how we dress, how we stand, how we think, how we urinate, how we look at our concerns, how we deal with the physical world, etc., etc., etc. The Domain of Concern and/or the Domain of Action we call sex is the entire set of concerns and practices associated with the facticity of being a sexual species.
All linguistic, social, historical and Selfish concerns in marriage revolve around our biological drive to reproduce our species. In a biological context, marriage appears as the fundamental division of labor. Males play their roles and females play theirs. This is not a political comment, or sexist. It is biological facticity.
Marriage exists, fundamentally, to produce and sustain a structure of fulfillment for both our ontogenic (individual) and phylogenic (species) concerns. It enables us to fulfill our biological duty to produce and care for our children.
This means our biological concerns drive us to produce language for seeing the world in a way that enables us to act both for our individual concerns and for the sake of reproducing our species.
We invent language so we can better take care of these concerns. But different cultures invent different languages to take care.
How cultures cope with sexuality
All human cultures manifest the same fundamental structures of married couples becoming a family and living in communities of families for the sake of living a good life.
Once we see our biological facticity and the fundamental way it throws all human beings into families and communities, we can begin to examine, observe and learn to cope with our own culture’s way of being sexual.
All animals have some way of coping with their sexuality. Some of them fight. Some of them make displays and choices. Some bond for life. Some of them cast their seeds to the wind.
Human beings cope with their sexual concerns for procreation and raising children with ethics of monogamy.
Many ethics or shared social customs for dealing with human sexuality abound, but (with very few exceptions) they revolve around keeping spouses monogamous and family units together. This makes great sense when we understand how limited we are as individuals and communities to survive alone. We simply cannot support any other structure. We are not powerful enough as individuals.
Our structures of marriage make pragmatic biological sense and the concerns of limited capacity that shape them are echoed throughout the biological world.
A village that condones indiscriminate sex or sex out of marriage ends up with a lot of pregnant girls who cannot support their children. The rest of the community must either accept the burden of the young girls and their children, which means be the surrogate father, or watch them die.
Sometimes the community doesn’t have the resources to care even if they want to do so. We are not moralizing. That is for people making a different offer. We are being pragmatic. When the burden falls on the community, it will collapse under the burden of too many single mothers and their children.
One aspect of our shared biological facticity is the “plasticity” produced by our nervous system. Sex is fundamentally the same for all human beings. Our plasticity leads to an infinite number of specific or unique ways we can form a culture to cope with our sexuality and our sexual drive to reproduce.
Traditional ways of coping with sexuality are breaking down
Each one of us embodies a specific cultural way of being married and dealing with sexuality that we inherit from coupling with our culture. And, as we have said before, these ways are traditional.
Tradition is a collection of observations about the world that have the world appear “obvious” to us.
Tradition is also the practices people have invented over time to cope with the “obvious” way they see the world.
When the world or the environment in which the tradition was effective changes, the tradition is made obsolete. Birth control, sexually transmitted diseases, television and marketing in all media, the Internet and increased awareness and knowledge of and about sex have made our traditions around sexuality obsolete.
We are confronted by a new world of sexuality. Invent new interpretations and continually design new practices to suit you and your spouse’s changing concerns.
Not a single discourse in the history of the planet exists to get us to be sexual or have sex. One isn’t needed. Sex is what we do. Our sex drive is hardwired (pun intended). All of the discourses and traditions about sex exist to shape how we think about sex and how we practice it. (Just as this paper is trying to do.)
These discourses are all philosophies of ethics, morals and skills for coping with our sexuality in a way that will produce a good life in the social environment that exists at the moment.
When we find ourselves in a different environment we need to rethink our philosophy of morals and ethics and redesign our skills for coping with our sexuality.
One traditional way of coping with sexuality is to shut down sexual titillation, stimulation or provocation by mandating human behavior.
This can be done through social rules forbidding conversations or availability. It can be done through mandating marriage practices or through the close supervision of courtships. It can be done through dress codes.
And, as you will have noticed by now, we can’t do that in this environment. Our environment won’t let us cope with sexuality or our sexual drive by restricting access to it. We cannot shut it down for ourselves, our spouses, or our children.
If we can’t control behavior, we have to learn how to think and cope in another way. That way is to learn to think with a new set of moral and ethical distinctions. And, we need to be responsible for inventing a new set of skills to make sure our spouse is happy.
Another major problem is how long we have extended our children’s adolescence and our own lives.
Our children are no longer an asset we have available to take care of our retirement. They are no longer working for the sake of the family by the time they are six or seven. Today, our children live at home until they are eighteen to twenty-two.
We are not dead by age thirty-five. We live until we are close to eighty years old.
Because of all of this, the sexual viability of our marriages has to last much longer and through many, many changes in the marriage.
This is why we claim we need to get used to our sexuality and why we need to get good at it.
And, how do we get “good” at sex?
Here are some specific suggestions:
Talk about it, a lot, until there is nothing you cannot or will not say about it.
The number one tip about being good at sex is to be enthusiastic about it.
No particular technique has proven to be “the one” we need to learn because sexual encounters and intercourse are always changing.
Variety is the spice of life when it comes to sex. Be creative and have fun.
Get the craziness out of your marriage about your sexuality. Get used to it. Be your sex and be sexy.
Sex is biological. Study the biology of sex.
Our way of coping is through ethics, so study ethics.
Sex is also cultural. Cultural means that acceptable morals and ethics for social behavior exist for any culture. Learn them.
Cultural offers of help, appropriate stimulation, tools (toys) and language, among other practices, are available. Find them.
Our plasticity means that we as individuals have a wide range of personal preferences about sex, and these can change over time. We don’t necessarily have sex the same way in our 50s as we did in our 20s when we were first married.
As spouses, we love, honor and cherish our spouse by accepting and working on behalf of our individual orientations towards sex. We reciprocate by being as lovable, honorable and cherishable as possible with our requests.
That is, design your requests for sex in a way that is also as satisfactory as possible for your spouse. Accept requests from your spouse in a high mood of willingness to fulfill while blending with your own desires.
Build skills your spouse likes … and then get ready to learn a new set as you get older or need variety, and as circumstances change. We are not urging you to change who you are already. We are urging you to expand your thinking and practices in ways that enable you to cope with the environment in which we find ourselves, whether you like it or not.
After all, what else is there to do? When you fulfill your spouse’s requests, do it so well that he or she doesn’t even think of breaking vows to forsake all others.