Casual sex in youth restricts chance of happy marriage later in life

Promiscuity is wrecking the chances of young people having happy marriages in later life, Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic said yesterday.

Oct 24, 2014

Cardinal Vincent Nichols made the comments just a week after Kieran Conry, the Bishop of Arundel and Brighton, resigned after a succession of affairs.

Promiscuity is wrecking the chances of young people having happy marriages in later life, Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic said yesterday.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, said that ‘casual relationships’ were wrong because they potentially involved sexual intercourse with a person’s future spouse.

They helped to destroy the concept of marriage as a ‘permanent faithful commitment’, the Cardinal said, making it harder for couples to stick together through the bad times as well as the good.

‘I don’t doubt that most young people aspire to having their own family,’ said Cardinal Nichols, who is in Rome for the Extraordinary Synod on the family, convened by Pope Francis to discuss the growing challenges to marriage and family life.

Young people, he continued, seek to have their own family ‘within the context of a stable relationship between husband and wife, having the family with a sense of permanence and a permanent faithful commitment’.

But such aspirations were thwarted by the onset of premature sexual activity, such as casual sex and cohabitation, the Cardinal argued, suggesting that such practices were a direct cause of marital infidelity in later life.

‘Nobody wants a wife or a husband who is unfaithful,’ he said, ‘so what we have to get across to people is that casual relationships before marriage is actually being casual with somebody’s future husband or wife.’

The comments of Cardinal Nichols, the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, were made during an interview with Catholic News Service, a U.S.-based news agency which was filmed and later posted on YouTube.

But they come at an embarrassing time for the Catholic Church in Britain as they were made just a week after the Pope accepted the resignation of Kieran Conry, the Bishop of Arundel and Brighton, after a succession of affairs, including one allegedly with a married mother-of-two.

The woman’s husband, who hired a private detective to spy on the couple, is threatening to sue the Church because he claims it must have known about the bishop’s affairs but did not act to stop him.

The Cardinal’s views are supported however by sociological studies which found that many people who embark on a colourful sexual career were often unable to either find a spouse or sustain a marriage for life.

They include research from The Marriage Foundation which revealed earlier this year that 47 per cent of women and 48 per cent of men aged 20 will never marry.

The findings showed a contemporary generational shift away from marriage as couples increasingly cohabit without ever taking the decision to commit.

Cohabitees, however, account for just 19 per cent of parents but 50 per cent of all family breakdown, with just seven per cent of cohabiting couples staying together until a child reaches 15 years.

Such trends reflect a dramatic change in lifestyles compared to the baby-boomer generation, which has seen 87 per cent of men and 92 per cent of women having married at some stage.

In 1970, the peak year for marriage, 564,818 men and women aged 25 got married. In 2010, just 56,598 tied the knot, a fall of 90 per cent.

Patricia Morgan, the sociologist who coined the phrase ‘marriage lite’ for cohabitation, said Cardinal Nichols was right in his analysis.

She said that studies from America have repeatedly shown that people who postpone sexual activity until maturity, or until they at least know their partner well, were more capable of a lasting relationship than those who did not.

She blamed the propensity to plunge ‘straight into sex’ on contraceptive-based sex education and that in the ‘long run’ such relationships were comparatively unsuccessful.

‘We have abandoned courtship,’ she continued. ‘Sex education tells us that it’s the children’s choice when they become “active”, like a volcano blowing up. We have got rid of the rules, all of the rules.’

Dr Morgan said it would be better to encourage restraint and said it was also vital that young people were taught about the many distinctions between marriage and cohabitation.

‘People increasingly have a series “shack-ups”,’ she said, which were unstable, meaning that women in particular were increasingly leaving it too late to have children.

‘Some are very upset about it,’ she added.

Louise Kirk, author of Sexuality Explained: A Guide for Parents and Children, said that the views of Cardinal Nichols were increasingly supported by science.

She said: ‘The social and medical sciences can now quantify some of the ways in which pre-marital sexual experiences detract from later marriage.

‘Through brain scan technology, for instance, we know that sexual experience is such a powerful thing that it alters the physical makeup of the brain for life. This is designed to “glue” us to our partner.’

Research by Patrick Fagan of the U.S. Heritage Foundation put this into perspective, she said.

‘A woman who has only ever had one sexual partner has an 80 per cent chance of a successful marriage,’ said Mrs Kirk.

‘Add in one extra partner, and it falls to 54 per cent, add a second and it drops to 44 per cent.’

She added: ‘One also of course runs the risk of damage to fertility from STDs and the use of contraception.’ --mail online

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