Promiscuity

Not long after I moved to Myrtle Beach, I went to a hair salon for men and got an appointment with a hairstylist named Kristin. Kristin was tall, thin, with great sneaky bigs, and a whole bunch of tattoos and piercings. By Myrtle Beach standards, she was a catch—if you live in Myrtle long enough, you’re going to end up with some tattoos. But Kristin was as serious as a heart attack. Every three weeks, I’d be greeted with her unsmiling visage, I’d sit down in the chair and try to crack some jokes, and never got so much as a chortle out of her. I could not locate the source of her unhappiness.

Well, at one point I heard a rumor that Kristin was “tearing up Tinder.” She was basically getting a tinder date every single day of the week, month, and year. She was hosing 365 guys a year, probably well over a thousand or two thousand men over the time that I knew her. Now, there are a lot of explanations for this behavior. She could have been what we used to call a “nymphomaniac,’ though I think the more polite term these days is “sex addict.” She could have been bored, and trying to find meaning in her life. She could have experienced trauma in childhood. It could have been any of these things and more. But I knew two things for sure: one, that there was a direct correlation between her promiscuity and her despondency, and two, that her behavior was going to complicate any efforts to settle down and get married somewhere down the line.

These days, the kids call it the “body count”—how many people you have slept with in your lifetime. By the way, the typical number is between four and ten. 3.9% of people report having more than 50 sexual partners throughout the course of their life. Any number higher than one is going to make your efforts to have a normal marriage more difficult. No, really, I love you more than those other 50 guys that I slept with. Really? Europe is more loosey-goosey about these sorts of things—it is the Americans that have the puritanical hang-ups, but the puritanical hang-ups are there for a reason: it’s tough to form a lasting committed relationship if you’ve accepted 500 hogs in your lifetime. It’s a near-universal human experience, to be jealous of an old lover. What if there were no old lovers to be jealous of? Wouldn’t that be nice?

So you mean—you don’t have sex until marriage, until your wedding night, and then you live happily ever after? Yes, that is what I am suggesting. I am suggesting that a marriage is more likely to be successful if you haven’t gone to poundtown 200 times before you head to the altar. We are human beings, with emotions. It can be difficult to imagine some other dude desecrating the stomach of your betrothed. Not a thought you really want to dwell on. But people do dwell on it—those thoughts can be all-consuming. And so you start of the marriage on a bad foot, filled with distrust and jealousy on day one. Not to say that it isn’t fixable—staying committed and monogamous over a period of decades can heal those wounds. One thing I am happy about is that the traditional bachelor party with strippers and hookers has mostly disappeared. Guys go fishing now, or golfing, or bowling. Lame, but the last thing you want to be doing is googling Can I get HPV from a blowjob? on your wedding day. The foregoing also applies to women, too. Don’t worry, guys—those Dancing Bear videos are fake. By the way, pornstars do get married to each other from time to time. And none of those marriages have ever, ever worked, for obvious reasons.

So like a lot of things in life, I think that organized religion has some collective wisdom about these sorts of things. The Bible says that you shouldn’t have sex before marriage. I don’t really care what the Bible says—you can do whatever the hell you want—all I’m saying is that you’re not going to be able to compartmentalize your life. You’re not going to be able to say, all those years of tearing up Tinder don’t count, and now it’s one vagina for the rest of your life, and expect that to work. This isn’t some kind of medieval modesty culture. This isn’t the product of me living in the South for the last fifteen years. I mean, look—if you really thought you could compartmentalize your life in such fashion, if you think you could make it work, then have at it. I think that if you can, it’s a form of psychopathy. We can’t separate emotions from sex. We have spent the last 60 years trying, and we can’t do it. We are already seeing some of the central tenets of the sexual revolution being undone. If the goal of the sexual revolution was to have unlimited, consequence-free sex, we are starting to learn that there are some consequences. Guilt. Shame. Wouldn’t it be nice to treat your body like an amusement park and live a life without guilt or shame? Sorry, but it can’t be done. But it looks like so much fun on PornHub! Well, those are some fucked-up people. I would not trade places with them in a second.

Also, one in six people have herpes.

Also, I know of many people who have had cancers related to HPV. No joke.

And gonorrhea is becoming antibiotic-resistant.

And HIV, though no longer a death sentence, is still no picnic.

There are lots of reasons to stay monogamous in a committed relationship. But let’s say you want to tear up Tinder. You have no idea who is walking through that door. You’re going to invite all that chaos and danger into your life? This person may not be a convict, but there is better than even odds that this is a fundamentally fucked-up person that you’re about to fuck. They’re not exactly sending their best on Tinder. Or Bumble, or any of the other apps. If you want to meet someone of the opposite sex, take Andrew Dice Clay’s advice and hang out down at the laundromat. Or take a college class. Or—gasp—go to church. I actually met a girl at church one time. She was quite insane, and her father was a crazy dentist, but it was better than playing dating app Russian Roulette. All these options are available to you. I mean, sure, there are some success stories on the apps, but they are few in number, and my guess is that you are going to hate yourself after it is over. If you go on a “date,” and you feel icky and gross afterwards, maybe this is not the answer? We all have that metaphysical and spiritual hole we are trying to fill up. Some people try to fill it up with the bottom of a glass, or a crack pipe, or the body count. It never seems to work.

And again—sex just isn’t that important. It’s one of the least important things that you can do. Much of the time, it’s tied up in ego, or feelings of worthiness. I’m definitely pro-masculinity, but there is an aspect of masculinity that I don’t quite like—this desire to put notches in one’s belt, as sort of a conquest or a series of conquests. I mean, I used to feel that way when I was 16, but I don’t anymore. Of course, now that I’m 51, my testosterone levels are through the floor, so that’s easy for me to say. But I put a lot of time and mental energy into chasing tail when I was younger, that I could have been focusing on something else—like school. If I hadn’t been such a horndog, it’s highly likely that I would have been admitted to a better school, and things would have turned out differently, and better. Sex has been nothing but a major distraction in my life, and I only started succeeding once I got my primal urges under control.

I am very happily married. Let’s say that my wife was to die tomorrow, and I got lonely, and wanted to meet someone. Would I go on Bumble? No. Would I go to church? Probably. Meeting people is like applying for jobs—the best ones are where there is an connection. You know someone who knows someone, and you have things in common. And there would be a long, slow courtship, with flowers and movies and dinner dates before we consummated the relationship. This is a principle about life in general—anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.