Adulthood Without Sex

By Philip D. Harvey
Sunday, May 12, 2002; Page B07

The abstinence-only sex education programs in our public schools call for "abstinence until marriage." The federal government spent $115 million on this message last year, and the Bush administration is proposing significant increases for the current year. Sexual abstinence until marriage is now official government policy.

The average age of marriage in the United States today is 27 for men and 26 for women. The abstinence-only program therefore asks our young people to renounce sexual activity throughout much of the early part of adult life.

Age 26 or 27 is an average. There are millions of Americans who do not marry until age 30, 35 or later. I myself did not marry until age 40. Had anyone suggested to me that I should remain sexually abstinent until that time, I would have found the idea preposterous.

Those who insist that sex education in our high schools be confined to exhortations to abstain from sexual activity might say they don't really mean abstinence until age 27 or age 30. What they really mean is abstinence during the younger years.

The problem with this approach is that it is dishonest. If those who assert that sex must be postponed until marriage really mean that sex should be postponed only until age 19 or 20 or 21, they should say so, and their message would be taken more seriously. They do not because their convictions dictate that sex outside marriage -- at any age -- is wrong and, if wrong, cannot be recognized. They may understand that it is unrealistic to expect abstinence until age 27, but they cannot permit themselves to alter their message to take that into account.

I wonder if those who seriously advocate abstinence until marriage would prefer to see the marriage age come down. It is in those cultures where marriage takes place at particularly early ages that abstinence until marriage is realistic. The average age of marriage in Bangladesh, for example, is 18. Under such circumstances abstinence until marriage is at least feasible.

But in modern industrialized societies, where women have educational opportunities and more than half attend college, marriage in the teenage years will likely become increasingly rare. If we agree, as I think most Americans do, that equal educational and occupational opportunities for women are a good thing, that our society is enhanced and enriched by these developments, then I think we must accept the fact that marriage in the middle or late twenties is the modern societal norm. If that is so, the expectation of sexual abstinence until marriage is utterly unrealistic.

I would argue also that such an expectation, when translated into a policy (such as federally funded sex education calling for such a restriction), is wrong. It is wrong to expect young people to be sexually abstinent until they are more than half way through their twenties. Sexual relations are an important component of human happiness, and there is no moral purpose served by abstaining from sex if two people are mature and responsible. Why should they be deprived of sex?

It is worth noting too that many of the reasons young Americans do not marry at age 17 or 18 or 19 are reasons compatible with much of America's traditional cultural agenda. Our youth are less inclined than they were some decades ago to marry hastily, perhaps to the wrong person. Instead, most young Americans wish to be sure that they have found the appropriate mate so that they may create an honorable and viable union. It is difficult to argue with such motivation. Even the practice of cohabitation prior to marriage, now very common in the United States, may be both a sensible and a moral practice, which makes the resulting marriage more likely to be happy and to endure.

In today's United States, a policy of abstinence until marriage is anachronistic. Abstinence until adulthood and then responsible, protected sex is the message we should convey.

Philip D. Harvey is a writer and businessman.