Marriage, Monogamy and Fidelity
Our recent posts regarding the male sex drive have shown how pervasive it can be. As we have noted, in adolescence and young adulthood hardly a waking minute will pass for the average male in which sexual thoughts and fantasies are absent.
Males are fixated on the biological imperative and in seeking sexual encounters, in general, in a far more intense and frequent fashion than females. Feminist often bewail the males obsession with sex and sometimes go as far as to say that such a fixation on sex is unhealthy and immature. They view mens’ sexual desires as being dehumanizing and object oriented. And while I agree that this can and sometimes is the case, I feel it is more how we treat and oppress the male sex drive which makes it so. In future posts I will explain this idea further, but for now we’ll just say that it is true that the average man focuses on sex to a much higher degree than the average female.
Women often point out that the male obsession with the act of sex and the male orgasm stunts relationships by overemphasizing the role of sex. Many strong arguments and examples can be given where the male sex drive relegates all other forms of human communication and intimacy in a relationship to a far too irrelevant position.
What is curious and a bit contradictory is the fact that while men focus on the biological imperative more than women, social convention sure focuses its attention on the sex act in the concept of monogamy. If sex isn’t so important than why the need for monogamy? Why is a relationship considered un-intimate and unloving if a spouse has sex with other people?
I’m not asking this because I’m opposed to monogamy or desire to espouse a state of pure hedonism. On the contrary I’ve been in a very rewarding and intimate monogamous marriage of some 24 years now, and I do feel the potential for intimacy in a monogamous relationship is hard to near impossible to match in an “open relationship”. My main reason for highlighting the social expectation of monogamy is to point out that while men are often more sexually driven, both men and woman place a high priority on sex in intimate relationships.
The question should be if society is to have the expectation that life partnerships be monogamous than how do we go about structuring marriages so that this can be easily accomplished? If we truly wanted to foster mutually rewarding monogamous partnerships than we should do more than just make the demand of fidelity? It would make sense that we should make an effort to understand the male sex drive and make the social expectations of it realistic and compassionate? Rather than blindly strive to regulate or repress the male sex drive we should try to find ways to unfold it?
Luckily for us nature has done as much to assist us in this matter as it has to make sexual fidelity difficult. In the all too common situation where a man’s appetite for sex is higher than his mate there are some potential areas which can bridge the sexual desire gap.
First it would seem wise to find a mate whose sex drive is somewhat close to yours. A man who wants sexual intercourse daily should not try to form a monogamous relationship with a woman who only desires sex on a weekly or monthly basis. This is setting oneself up for failure as the priority gap is far too wide to successfully bridge.
Since sex is about pleasure as much as desire it offers many opportunities to reach a rewarding compromise. A man devoted to pleasing his mate and a woman open to the physical pleasures of sex have a very good chance of getting on the same page sexually. While a man often has a stronger and more pervasive sex drive, the females ability to experience sexual pleasure is as strong if not stronger than a man. So while a man has a built in sexual urge, the female has an almost endless ability to attain sexual pleasure.
While even the most potent of young men can have a handful of ejaculations (pun intended) the females ability to have orgasms is relatively unlimited. Not only can the woman have more orgasms, but their intensity seems quite awesome as well.
A woman who enjoys sex is more likely to increase the frequency of their sexual encounters. The man who makes pleasing his partner his highest priority is likely to successfully bridge the sexual drive part of the gap. While many sexually gratified females don’t ever become as sexually driven or obsessed as their mates, they do find ways to match men in the pleasure department, often making them open to frequency of sexual intercourse as their hormone injected partner.
In my next post I will explore some of the problems in bridging the gap in relationships where there is a significant gap in sexual appetites.
Jim Guido