Eighty-four percent of unmarried Americans between the ages of 18 and 23 have already had sex according to a newly released, massive study, Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marriage (Oxford, 2011) by Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker. Regnerus is a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford, 2007). Uecker is a post-doc with the Carolina Population Center at UNC-Chapel Hill. Together they have collated a monumental amount of data from numerous sources to describe the sexual values of young adults in the United States.
Some will be shocked to read that,
Only 4 percent of all 18-23-year-old women are currently in a romantic relationship but not sexually involved with the person whom they are seeing.
To turn it around, 96 percent of 18-23-year-old women in a romantic relationship are also sexually involved with the person whom they are seeing! That’s simply stunning.
While turning 18 used to be the marker of adulthood, when children moved out of their parents’ house and started living “on their own,” today fewer young people than ever consider themselves adults at 18. Regnerus and Uecker observe:
When we ask our introductory sociology class—comprised largely of college freshmen and sophomores—how many of them think of themselves as adults, seldom do more than 10 percent of them raise their hands. These are America’s emerging adults: accelerating in sexual desire and interest and at the cusp of their peak fertility and virility, yet slowing down to meet growing educational expectations, pursue expanding career pathways, and savor the joys of friends and self-actualization.
Or, as New York Times columnist David Brooks insightfully puts it:
Now young people face a social frontier of their own. They hit puberty around 13 and many don’t get married until they’re past 30. That’s two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around. This period isn’t a transition anymore. It’s a sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules. Once, young people came a-calling as part of courtship. Then they had dating and going steady. But the rules of courtship have dissolved. They have been replaced by ambiguity and uncertainty. Cell phones, Facebook and text messages give people access to hundreds of “friends.” That only increases the fluidity, drama and anxiety.
The bottom line is that, by their own profession, adolescents are having grown-up sex. And, like all adolescents, they somehow expect not to have to face the negative consequences.
What all of this means of course is that by the time these young adults reach their 30s they are more likely than not to be sexually, emotionally, and relationally wounded. Someone will have to help them pick up the pieces of their broken lives.
It is not for the sake of prudery that—following the biblical pattern—previous generations have maintained that sex, marriage, and procreation were indissoluably linked, even if they didn’t always obey the pattern themselves. The Bible’s aim is to glorify God and to prescribe relationships and institutions in which humans can flourish. Marriage is one of those institutions. As Christopher Ash has so remarkably put it in the title of his book, marriage is sex in service to God.
Sex should be reserved for those who are mature enough to take on the responsibility that comes with it, namely, marriage and openness to nurturing children. Following this script would either mean postponing sexual activity or having to grow up.
Premarital Sex in America is not all bad news, however. Regnerus and Uecker do offer a profile of young adults who are still virgins, even declaring: “we want to clarify that plenty of young adults are still virgins, and these shouldn’t be thought of as abnormal or sexually stunted. They are, nevertheless, not the norm.”
What the virgins have in common:
- They’re in college, especially four-year degree programs, or else are college graduates.
- They’re more religious, especially in terms of how central it is to their identity.
- They’re not prone to getting drunk.
- They don’t consider themselves popular.
A few characteristics of emerging-adult virgins are gender specific:
- Asian men are more likely than white men to be virgins.
- Regular churchgoing is more a hallmark of virginity in men than it is in women.
- Politically conservative women, by party or self-identity, are more likely to be virgins.
The book ends by helpfully exploding ten myths about sex in what the authors describe as “emerging adulthood.”
- First, long-term exclusivity is a fiction.
- Second, the introduction of sex is necessary in order to sustain a fledging or struggling relationship.
- Third, the sexual double standard is inherently wrong and must be resisted by any means.
- Fourth, boys will be boys. That is, men can’t be expected to abide by the sexual terms that women may wish to set.
- Fifth, it doesn’t matter what other people do sexually; you make your own decisions.
- Sixth, porn won’t affect your relationships.
- Seventh, everyone else is having more fun than you are.
- Eighth, sex need not mean anything.
- Ninth, marriage can always wait.
- Tenth, moving in together is definitely a step toward marriage.