Below this January 14 post on experience and numbers, bmmg39 writes:
…my view is that, often, people with little or no experience in a certain thing — it CAN be sex but it could also mean romantic love, or kissing, or slow-dancing, or whatever — often seek others with the same low level or non-level of experience. Someone who’s never “soul-kissed” someone else might not feel comfortable with someone who’s done that with a hundred people already. That doesn’t mean the first person thinks that there’s something wrong with the second; it means that the first person would like to be remembered fondly as someone else’s first experience in that department — with all the wonderful awkwardness and nervousness that is said to come with it.
The bold emphasis is mine. What bmmg writes sounds innocent and sweet enough. But the problem is clear: when one of our chief longings is “to be remembered fondly”, to be “someone else’s first”, we’re placing our own desires ahead of our partner’s. We’re using sex as a way of leaving a mark on another person’s body or heart, hoping — as humans tend to hope — that we won’t be forgotten. There’s no question that most of us would like to leave an impression on other people; perhaps it’s the historian in me, but there are few worse fears I have, to be honest, than that I will be completely forgotten! But bmmg makes the mistake of assuming that “first” equals “most memorable.” Ask around. Legions of people, particularly women, would rather forget their first experience of heterosexual intercourse. There’s not infrequently a world of difference between, say, the first partner with whom you had intercourse and the first partner with whom you truly felt close and safe.
When my wife and I were planning our wedding, she was hardly unaware that this was to be my fourth marriage — and her first. (Indeed, I have been the first husband to four different women.) A friend of ours did ask her, on one occasion, if it bothered her that she was doing something for the first time that I had done several times before. My fiancee, sensible as ever, said, “No, because this is the first time he’s doing it with me.” She was focused, bless her, on the marriage we were building together. She didn’t deny the reality of what had come before, but she rightly saw no reason to believe that prior experience on my part would diminish the unique intensity of what we were creating as a team. She knew better than to see me as a three-time loser and a has-been. So when we talked about rings and dresses and bands and caterers, she was aware — on some level — that I had had all those conversations before. But she was also clear that passion is not automatically killed by repetition; she knew enough to know that past behavior isn’t always the best indicator of future action. Above all, she believed that most of the time, the axiom of “post hoc ergo propter hoc” holds true: my ability to be a great husband in my fourth marriage was in no small degree a consequence of all the mistakes I had made in the previous three. Some folks hit a home run on their first at bat. Others… need to be sent down to the minors a time or three.
When a good relationship grows and endures, it does so in its own memorable ways. There is very little, from a purely physically sexual standpoint, that my wife and I could possibly do together that we haven’t each separately done with other people in the past. But that has damn all to do with the memories we create together and the marks we leave on each other. For heaven’s sakes, when I kiss my wife, I’m not comparing her tongue to that of umpteen other women; I’m fairly certain that she isn’t comparing my touch to that of her previous lovers! The tapes of what was are stored away. Why on earth would it matter that I’m not the first to make the woman I love call on the name of God in a moment of pleasure? It would only matter if I allowed my ego to trump my love, if the need to be the first was more important than the need to be the now.
When I was in high school, I lost my virginity to my first serious girlfriend. I was not her first, not by a long shot. She was a year younger than me, but with considerably more experience. But when I first had sex with her, tenderly and awkwardly, I was not thinking “Damn, I wonder if she’s thinking about Joe or Bob or Brutus and if they were better than me.” Even as a teenager, I had enough sense to stay focused on what we were doing in the moment. And as the relationship progressed, and we fell more deeply in love, I knew and trusted that she loved no one else as she loved me. I wanted exclusivity very badly, and honest-to-God, spent very little time wondering about what she had done with other boys and men before me. I knew exclusivity and novelty are two radically different things. To ask for the first is reasonable; to wish to be the provider of the second for another is a function of ego and insecurity. As messed up a kid as I was in many ways, I somehow was lucky enough to grasp that at seventeen.
It is right and good to want to leave a mark upon the world. It is right and good to want to be remembered for the love we shared with others, both the intimate erotic love with certain partners and the more platonic, filial, or agape love we share with our families, friends, and the creatures around us. It’s abundantly obvious I’ve got a healthy ego, and I like to leave that mark in people’s lives! But from the time that I was a geeky, earnest teenage virgin, I’ve understood that an obsession with wanting to be first had nothing to do with love. It’s about control and insecurity. And while the young and inexperienced are often naturally insecure, we never have the right to project our own fears onto others by demanding — or even vocally wishing — that they had not had the past they have had.
And in the end, there are always new firsts. My wife and I will soon be parents — what a first that will be! My wife and I have been to all seven continents together, have ridden century rides together, have buried our fathers together. Those were firsts, bitter and sweet alike. There will always be more. In the face of these wonders, what possible meaning could there be to a history of other people’s skin on our skin?
UPDATE: After writing this post, I drove to the gym. The first song I heard on the car radio was Roberta Flack’s famed cover of the Ewan MacColl classic “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” It’s a perfect song to capture what I’m talking about — it’s all about the joy of firsts, but only the firsts one makes in a relationship, not the firsts one might ever had had with another person. There’s a healthy way and an unhealthy way to think about firsts, and this is the healthy way.
The first time ever I saw your face
I thought the sun rose in your eyes
And the moon and stars were the gifts you gave
To the dark and the empty skies, my love,
To the dark and the empty skies.
The first time ever I kissed your mouth
And felt your heart beat close to mine
Like the trembling heart of a captive bird
That was there at my command, my love
That was there at my command.
And the first time ever I lay with you
I felt your heart so close to mine
And I knew our joy would fill the earth
And last till the end of time my love
It would last till the end of time my love
The first time ever I saw your face, your face,
your face, your face
There’s no suggestion that either person in this song is a virgin — the magic is only that created by these two people, unaffected in the slightest by what might have come before. I’ve always loved the song, but never thought of it in this context. Now I like the song even more.
I just wanted to say this is a lovely post, Hugo. Thank you.
I greatly enjoy your blog, and your humility, your self-awareness, and your complexity. But sometimes you have a tendency to take natural feelings and make them sound selfish, dysfunctional, or wrong.
You’re on your fourth marriage but for your wife it’s her first. An analog to a traditional male fantasy, the experienced man introducing a virgin into the joys of sex. Maybe this post is a motivated by subconscious “reaction formation”. I don’t know of course — but it would be a natural way to feel (not selfish, dysfunctional, or wrong). It doesn’t diminish your love for your wife or the completeness of your marriage as compared to the earlier disasters.
But . . .
To hear someone say, “You are the first to make me feel like I can amount to something!”
or . . .
To be the first person with whom a woman has an orgasm.
or . . .
“You are the first person I ever had a fulfilling relationship with!”
or . . .
“You are the first teacher who actually explained this to me in a way I understand!”
or . . .
(etc.)
The desire to be “the first” in these situations — where pleasure or fulfillment is experienced by the other person (as opposed to, say, being the first to break the other person’s arm) — this is not a desire to be condemned. Perhaps there is an element of selfishness to them, but not all of us are completely altruistic, and if takes a degree of ego to make the effort, then there’s nothing wrong with it.
I think, captcrisis, we need to honor that having a feeling is of course natural, while reminding folks that verbalizing those feelings isn’t always a good idea. And we can process through those feelings on our own without making our partners feel even the slightest frisson of discomfort about the experience disparity. Honor the feeling, sure, but it would be foolish and cruel to allow that feeling to inform a decision to enter into a relationship. It’s something to be worked through and overcome.
Jealousy and rage are indeed “natural”. But our cerebral cortexes can trump nature every time.
It sounds like you have achieved an admirable level of closure with your past relationships, Hugo, and so you can genuinely offer your wife “exclusivity” as you put it. However, my guess is that a lot of folks have more unresolved business from their past love affairs or other close personal relationships that may have ended badly. A disparity in experience between the partners may make the less-experienced partner anxious because she just doesn’t know how to handle a situation she’s never been in - the situation of having a lot of “introjects” of your previous lovers jostling around in your head.
Jendi, I wonder if you aren’t conflating two things. One is the issue of one’s own memories of one’s own past — and that is something each of us needs to deal with as best we can. The other issue, the one I’m addressing here, is the issue of the less-experienced partner stressing about the previous lovers of the more-experienced partner. And that’s where some good self-soothing comes in, and where we need to do the work of redefining what we mean by “first.”
It’s my job to make sure that when I’m with my wife, my head is not filled with memories of other people. It’s not rocket-science difficult. And it’s also my job to make sure that any flashes of anxiety about her previous lovers get self-soothed, and that I don’t make it her job to fix or reassure me. Vice-versa and all that.
What concerns me with a lot of the conversation about this topic is the implicit slut-shaming — the suggestion that abundant experience somehow damages someone’s worth, or loveability, or suitability for marriage.
Yes, lots of unresolved stuff out there. Which means we have an obligation to resolve it without daring to make it our next partner’s problem.
I think you are right about what we should do, but not everyone is as enlightened. I’m with bmmg, I am a virgin and I want very badly to meet and marry another virgin. I don’t want to think about my future wife having been with anyone else but me, not just for religious reasons, but also because I can’t imagine the pain of thinking about her past lovers.
For me, it’s pretty easy to tell who wants a virgin or near-virgin for healthy reasons vs. who wants one for far more dubious ones–someone who is a virgin or near-virgin themselves wanting the same, I find quite understandable and sympathetic. Someone who is quite experienced, wanting a virgin…not just wanting someone specific and finding out he/she happens to be a virgin, which is totally fine, but actually wanting a virgin…I think that’s really, as Hugo says, “But the problem is clear: when one of our chief longings is …to be “someone else’s first”, we’re placing our own desires ahead of our partner’s. We’re using sex as a way of leaving a mark on another person’s body.” Fairly repulsive, reeking of a need to dominate and control and/or a repellent method of valuation for other human beings, etc. In other words, FAIL! F’rinstance, whoever it is that’s trying to buy that broad’s supposed virginity in Nevada for zillions of dollars.
You’re going to be a parent? I think I missed the announcement!
Mozel Tov
The older I get, the weirder this whole virginity fetish that social conservatives have seems to me. It’s so counterintuitive. I can think of literally no other situation where you’d prefer a LACK of experience for something really important. “Ya know, I want the best surgery for my kid’s brain tumor so of course I’m going to pick the doctor who has never performed one! After all, there’s no surgery like your first one and I don’t want some doctor who has been ruined by a bunch of previous surgeries working on my child.” Yes, I realize that opens up the paradox of how you can’t be “experienced” until you get entry-level opportunities, but still.
That *isn’t* healthy. Because unless your future wife never saw a man before she met you, she may have had crushes, or gone on dates, or been in love, even if she’s a virgin. How will you handle that? Will you be in emotional agony knowing that she’s loved another, or held hands with another, or kissed another (even if she’s never had sex)? And really, why so much pain? What is it about a spouse’s past life that is so painful?
I’m also, frankly, disgusted by the effects of the ‘virginity fetish’ on those who didn’t have much say in their past sexual history. To reject someone who was molested as a child, or raped as an adult, because “I’m not their first” suggests a really creepy view of sex - that it’s a degrading experience (particularly for women) and you only get to pop the seal one time before it’s open, so to speak.
Great post as usual!!
This is COMPLETELY off topic - but being new parents is such an adventure!! Many people find the first few months very challenging - it can be a great shock to suddenly have a very small and vulnerable person completely dependent on you. And, particularly for women - the loss of autonomy can be very shocking. Having the ‘baby blues’ is completely normal - it hit me two weeks after the birth of my son - like ‘oh crap - this is forever’. And I did mourn my old life - while celebrating this new life. This shock and confusion I felt is one of the reasons I’m training to be a post-natal group facilitator - because I think it’s such wonderful and vulnerable and frightening time for new parents.
I’m sure your wife will have lots of support and there are lots of mums and baby groups around which will feel like a godsend in those long days which stretch ahead of a new mother - just having a group of other exhausted mums to talk to is wonderful.
“Above all, she believed that most of the time, the axiom of “post hoc ergo propter hoc” holds true: my ability to be a great husband in my fourth marriage was in no small degree a consequence of all the mistakes I had made in the previous three.”
I may be misunderstanding, but isn’t post hoc ergo propter hoc a logical fallacy? B followed A, therefore A caused B - it sounds plausible, but isn’t actually proof.
I think you’re looking for something about learning from experience, which does hold true.
I think physical intimacy is an area where ‘better’ and ‘worse’ aren’t meaningful comparions between people. Within a relationship, you may have better sex or worse sex than last time. But comparing two people only makes sense if you are focused solely on your own pleasure - if ‘better’ means ‘closer to my fantasy ideal’. If you are focused on their experience too, and on what you are making together, there isn’t any better or worse - there’s only different.
@C-Lin: What mythago said.
@Lisa KS: Yes, I do feel a lot more sympathy for the inexperienced wanting people who are likewise inexperienced than for those who are more experienced wanting the same. Virgins who want virgins might want to do some thinking about the absoluteness of that requirement, but non-virgins who want virgins strike me as making a power play. Sort of like guys who advertise on dating sites for women who must be younger (whether it’s “must be much younger” or “I’ll accept a woman anywhere up to a year younger than me, but not my age or older”).
@Donna: On the other hand, “experienced is better” doesn’t strike me as any better a rule. Sex isn’t a job (for most of us), but a form of communication with someone one (usually) cares about. I don’t ask for resumes before I converse with someone, or hug someone, or go to a movie with someone. And, really, how good the sex is has more to do with whether you’re on the same page in desires to begin with and whether you’re both willing to listen to the other, because skills can be learned (need, to some extent, to be learned with each new person, given that we don’t all like the same things), but an unwillingness to listen is unwillingness to listen no matter how many partners said unwillingness to listen has been inflicted on.
@Everyone: I do think that there are a lot of ways in which it’s reasonable to care about someone’s previous experience. There may be exes who aren’t quite emotionally fully exes hanging around, you may find out when you talk about your experiences that you have radically different values (it’s one thing to ask someone who thinks sex belongs in marriage to consider the possibility that “ever had an experience outside marriage” shouldn’t be a bar, and another to think that someone who thinks sex belongs in marriage will actually be compatible with someone who thinks no strings sex is innocent fun), you may find that the other person has done, and not resolved, things that are hurtful to others (e.g. has still abandoned children from previous relationships) and you may learn things about the other person’s sexual proclivities (e.g. one person had a much lower or higher sex drive than all his or her previous partnets, or one only gets off where BDSM is involved while the other is strictly vanilla) that point to a mismatch. But I think the form of caring that reduces everything to whether the person is actually technically a virgin (or what the person’s “number” is) is misguided.
My wife and I will soon be parents — what a first that will be!
I don’t know if this was mentioned before, but if so I too missed it. So congratulations!! My wife and I are experiencing this first now ourselves, and quite an experience it is!
Whoa, I missed that, too. Mazel tov, Hugo!
Oh, sure. And I understand this to some extent. If you’re going on your very first trip to Paris with your SO, you may very well enjoy it more if they’ve never gone either, so that you can discover it together; it may not be as fun for you if they’ve been there, done that, know everything. (On the other hand, you might enjoy Paris a lot less if neither of you has a clue where anything is, and it turns out that your partner really wants to spend the whole trip in the Louvre while you want to visit restaurants.)
That kind of wish doesn’t strike me as such a terrible thing. But imagine if you refused to go to Paris with your SO because she’d had a layover once at Charles de Gaulle Airport, or if she’d read a guidebook you hadn’t and so “knew much more than” you did about the city. Or if the idea of your SO having been to Paris once or twice previously caused you actual emotional pain.
Mythago: I intend to add ‘going to Paris’ to ‘playing Lego Star Wars’ and ‘haylofting’ as euphemisms for having sex.
For me, the sense that in this relationship things may not be “firsts,” but they are better; closer, more fun. It may not be her first time to Paris, but she enjoys the trip more than before because of my company. The fact that we both know that we’ve each been to Paris before makes the lights appear even gayer this time, when we are finally with the right partner. If I view every activity as a contest to be the first, or the best, I will probably miss out on the present moment; the only place where the opportunity to achieve “bliss” actually exists.
FWIW, there actually were parts of Paris that I hadn’t seen with anyone else before my husband; people are different, so I wind up seeing different sights with him from what I’d seen with anyone before him.
Lynn Gazis-Sax,
I don’t think there’s nothing wrong with a relatively inexperienced guy preferring a partner who is relatively inexperienced as well. I also disagree with you in that I don’t think that it’s necessarily wrong for a more experienced person to prefer someone less experienced. Perhaps there is from a feminist perspective, but then, I’m not a feminist. It’s simply false that gender is something socially constructed and that men and women are fundamentally the same under the surface. Men and women are different in deep and essential ways, and that’s part of what makes the world such a rich and interesting place. And one reflection of those essential difference is that men very often are attracted to younger women, and women to older men. I don’t see anything wrong with that, as long as both parties are adults, and they are both looking for a long-term relationship, hopefully leading to marriage and children. The feminist model of marriage that elides differences between the sexes is just one among many, and not all of us find it convincing.
There’s at least one very good reason for many men to be looking for younger partners- fertility. If for whatever reason you’re an unmarried man in your early 30s- perhaps because of natural timidity, or bad luck, or whatever- then it makes a lot of sense to be looking for a younger partner, because it’s an unfortunate reality that women’s chances of having healthy children are lessened once they get into their mid-30s. Unfortunately our society is not set up to support people starting to have children in their early to mid 20s, which is probably the optimal age from a biological point of view.
I don’t typically remember my “firsts” with much fondness: my first kiss is a comical story that ends with “…and I was shocked that *this* was something people did for fun”; my first boyfriend was sweet, but my memories of him are mostly bland; and although my first time having intercourse was consensual and desired, the less said about how the mechanics went, the better. I’ve never been to Paris, but on my first trip to California I was a spotty teenager and fed up with my family.
I think the reality of first times just doesn’t match very well with the fantasy.
I don’t think there’s nothing wrong with a relatively inexperienced guy preferring a partner who is relatively inexperienced as well. I also disagree with you in that I don’t think that it’s necessarily wrong for a more experienced person to prefer someone less experienced.
Wait, you’re saying that you both disagree with me about being relatively OK about inexperienced guys who prefer inexperienced partners and disagree with me in that you do find it OK for a more experienced person to prefer someone less experienced? That it’s OK for experienced people to want virgins, but there’s something wrong with virgins wanting such? I think I’m missing something here.
He didn’t say anything about virgins.
That seems to me a distinction without a difference, captcrisis, though; it still makes no sense to me that it would be OK for people with a large amount of previous sexual experience to want someone with a small amount of previous sexual experience, but that there would be something wrong with someone with a small amount of previous sexual experience wanting someone who’s at his own level, even if all the men concerned are happy enough to have a non-virgin.
If it’s reasonable for a woman with too much sexual experience (however much too much may be) to be considered somehow spoiled as a prospective girl friend or wife, wouldn’t that fact in itself make it unethical for a man to sleep with lots of women he had no intention of staying with, even if there were no other ethical reason for him to limit the people with whom he’d be willing to have sex? Any ethical rule for your own behavior that can be respected has to be one that can be extended to the rest of the world, including the other sex. So, even if you think feminism errs in the direction of treating men and women too much the same, I don’t see how a difference in how you view sexual experience, between men and women, can possibly be justified.
And, even if you do, by whatever bizarre logic, manage to find it OK for a man to sleep with lots of women and then reject women who’ve slept with a similar number of men, then surely a man who hasn’t slept with lots of women ought to be more justified, not less, in wanting a less experienced partner.
Any ethical rule for your own behavior that can be respected has to be one that can be extended to the rest of the world, including the other sex.
By which I mean, not that one person can’t follow ethical rules that they consider not binding on others, but that an act can’t be ethical if the result of allowing everyone to do it (within whatever constraints you’re imposing on yourself) is bad, and that includes judging acts unethical if having everyone of your own sex act in a certain way would require some of the other sex to act in a way that you’d judge bad for them.
Lynn,
Sorry, I made a typo there. I don’t think there is anything wrong with preferring a partner who is more experienced, less experienced, or just the same as you are. I _especially_ don’t see anything wrong with relatively inexperienced guys looking for a relatively inexperienced partner.
I don’t think that anyone, male or female, should be “sleeping with lots of people that you have no intention of staying with.”
And therefore, it’s OK for a man to think of a woman as a slut, spoiled or ‘too experienced’ for having equal or lesser sexual experience than he does? You’re going to have to walk me through that one; I missed a few steps.
If biology suggests that women should marry younger, then men who are ’shy’ or choose not to marry until their 30s or later missed the boat. You’re acting as though biology entitles a man to a partner in a certain age bracket. It makes more sense to argue that if a man in his 20s is unable to find a similar-age female partner, that’s evolution’s way of showing he shouldn’t be in the gene pool at all, because if he were a good mate he’d have found the right partner when he was her age.
Mythago,
Er, no, you’re assuming that I buy the feminist argument that men should always be the same age or younger than their partners. But I don’t accept it. I certainly don’t think that being highly experienced makes you a sl*t, necessarily. (And I certainly don’t think highly of _men_ who have lots of partners. Probably, to be fair, less highly than I do of women in such situations. Women who sleep with lots of guys are often motivated by perhaps ill-advised romantic dreams- guys in such a position are typically motivated by lust.)
And no, your point about biology simply doesn’t follow. Men remain procreatively capable for longer than women, so if we conclude anything we should be concluding that nature encourages older men and younger women to be with each other. By the way, anyone who can find someone willing to share their life and raise kids with him, is “entitled” to procreate- if democracy means anything, it means that. The right to have a spouse and children is a right given us by nature, not society, and no society, “feminist” or otherwise, has the right to take it away.
Women who sleep with lots of guys are often motivated by perhaps ill-advised romantic dreams- guys in such a position are typically motivated by lust.)
Because women NEVER have sex because they like sex, ya know. We’re always DAMAGED.
Sigh. This is not a ‘feminist argument’. This is a made-up strawfeminist argument, because like a chess game, it’s much easier to win an argument when you are controlling what happens on both sides. Nobody has made this argument, as you’re perfectly aware.
The argument that men want sex and women want love is wishful thinking. I understand that it might be upsetting to think that the gentle, nurturing sex might think with the little head from time to time, or that your wife or girlfriend will stay faithful to you as long as she loves you.
Nonsense. If a man cannot find a mate when he is young, what does that say about his evolutionary fitness? Young men are more virile than older men; surely you don’t think those horny 20-year-olds are just patiently sitting in the bush and waiting 10-20 years for a nice young thing to come along. And women of all ages seem plenty interested in young men (see, e.g.: Twilight fandom). A man who marries young has a longer reproductive life than an older man; instead of taking a chance that he will live to be 30 or so and then pass on his genes, he starts early. And from the woman’s point of view, a younger mate is healthier, has younger sperm-generating cells (thus healthier sperm) and she will spend much less time as a widow.
Mythago,
You can rail all you want about Hector’s suppositions, but it doesn’t change the fact that the man tends to be the older one in the couple (sometimes a good deal older), for whatever reasons . . . and that men are fertile almost their whole lives, and are not the ones who worry about biological clocks.
captcrisis, you can hedge all you want with “tends to be” and “sometimes”…but that doesn’t change the fact that in the US, at least, the age gap is pretty small; age of first marriage is 27 for men and 25 for women. That’s hardly evidence that evolution intended young girls to have Daddy issues, as Hector suggests.
As for biological clocks, that’s a rather modern invention. Throughout history, women had children as long as they were fertile, because they didn’t have an alternative. That’s decades of childbearing, not the tiny window of 25-30 that is considered appropriate for American women to have kids.
But I’ve long since learned that logic is useless against the desire of certain men to believe that even when they’re old, balding and wrinkly, they’ll have their pick of hot young co-eds. ;)
but it doesn’t change the fact that the man tends to be the older one in the couple
By an average of about two years or so, if you’re talking about the modern day US.
Look, as the one who brought age into the thread, I really have no objection to even much older men pairing off with much younger women, as long as everyone’s consenting and fully adult and no one started off in a position of authority over the other. All I meant is that the guy who puts in his singles ad that he wants women everywhere from 20 years old to 1 year younger than his own age, if his name isn’t Sean Connery, is being presumptuous and saying certain things about himself. His right to place the ad, my right to think less of him for it.
If he’s already found a woman significantly younger than him, and they’re both happy together (and both adult and no abuse of authority involved), then I don’t think less of him for that.
Lynn Gazis-Sax,
If you’re OK with age differences between fully adult people who are both consenting, then I don’t have much to argue with you over. Yes, you have the right to think less of guys who put that in their singles ads, though I wouldn’t necessarily agree with you. And I have the right to think less of people who put “I don’t ever want to have kids” in their singles ads. I accept what the Bishop of Rochester (England) has said, that childbearing, if both parties’ health permits, is an inherent part of marriage and not an optional extra.
I’m not sure that a two-year age difference in modern America reflects what the “natural” tendency in human nature is. It seems to me that the understanding of family and sexual morality in modern America is grossly unnatural, as demonstrated through our high rate of abortion, divorce, fatherless children, and all manner of sexual abnormalities.
“Marriage” is unnatural, Hector, so calling modern society “unnatural” is ridiculous.
Antigone,
I mean ‘natural’ as in the sense of the Christian and Platonic natural law conception.
That’s a handy test - if human behavior doesn’t match the theory, clearly the behavior is wrong, not the theory.
In America people have a great deal of choice in choosing their mates; forced marriages are illegal, women and men have equal legal rights, families cannot veto marriages, it is not forbidden to marry a person of a different culture or religion, and so on. Given this ‘free market’, most couples choose someone pretty close to their own age. I think that’s a pretty good indicator of what men and women ‘naturally’ prefer.
Mythago,
While I agree with you that the relative age gap in America is not really a deviation from some kind of ‘natural’ norm, I wouldn’t discount the role of social conditioning entirely, nor the effects of the structure of society - for example, the fact that men make more money than women in our society is probably a factor pushing the gap wider, since it takes a certain amount of stable prosperity to settle down.
My view is that there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ age-of-first-marriage, at least not as practiced in the real world. Every society’s conception of what is the appropriate age to get married is going to be so heavily influenced by societal factors that even if there is a ‘natural age’, there’d be no way to divine that through all the layers of culture. It’s like trying to figure out where the hockey puck started after two minutes of passing and steals and attempted goals.
So it’s kind of a meaningless question to even ask, I think. And doing so also opens the door to more unsavory things, like condemning relationships in which there is a larger age gap, even between consenting adults. If you accept that there is some ‘natural’ way to be, then you’re implicitly characterizing all other ways of being as unnatural (with connotations of wrongness), and that’s not something with which I’m comfortable.
^This last part really goes double for Hector.
MH,
I don’t think there is a natural age to get married. I think that the ideal age of marriage is somewhat higher for men than for women, because of issues surrounding fertility and economic issues about providing for a family. But obviously that age isn’t ideal for _every_ couple. I don’t have a problem with men being involved with women who are older, younger, or the same age- except when the whole reason they base their choices on is to be consistent with feminist philosophy.
That certainly doesn’t mean that I think every sexual choice is equally valid. Mythago is free to condemn age differences among adult men and women, and I’m free to condemn abortion, homosexuality, and voluntarily childless marriages. I think that her point of view is wrong, and no doubt she thinks the same of mine.
I don’t condemn age differences among adult men and women. You can tell yourself this as many times as you like, because you’re apparently more comfortable arguing with the imaginary feminists in your head.
For people interested in discussion outside of the imaginary vistas where they are always right, what I do condemn is the need to project one’s personal fetishes and preference (older man/younger woman) as an ‘ideal’ and to pretend that science and God make those fetishes not only preferable for oneself, but desirable for all, rejecting any evidence to the contrary (such as how people actually behave).
MH - I actually agree with you. Western culture pushes the idea that the man ought to be the more powerful person in the relationship; therefore it’s considered at least odd if the woman is older, wealthier, taller, and so on. But even with that pressure, the age gap at first marriage in the US is only two years; hardly a suggestion that young women really all want to marry Grandpa.
Re: I don’t condemn age differences among adult men and women.
No, you just make insulting snide comments about them, and apparently you like to make fun of “low-class males who need to weed themselves out of the genetic lottery”, I’m paraphrasing.
Mythago,
I don’t know of a charitable way to interpret this:
Re: It makes more sense to argue that if a man in his 20s is unable to find a similar-age female partner, that’s evolution’s way of showing he shouldn’t be in the gene pool at all, because if he were a good mate he’d have found the right partner when he was her age.
It seems to me like a personal insult.
“But the problem is clear: when one of our chief longings is ‘to be remembered fondly’, to be ’someone else’s first’, we’re placing our own desires ahead of our partner’s.”
In addition to the forgotten point that the “partner” would be imaginary if Person A is still looking for someone who isn’t so jaded as Person B seems to be, I’d suggest that one’s own feelings about love, while not deserving dominance, shouldn’t take a back seat to anyone else’s.
“But bmmg makes the mistake of assuming that ‘first’ equals ‘most memorable.’ Ask around. Legions of people, particularly women, would rather forget their first experience of heterosexual intercourse.”
“First” often does equal “most memorable.” Someone who’s had many dates (since NON-SEXUAL experiences were the facet of my post) since then will nonetheless usually remember his/her first-ever date very vividly. That’s the reason so many people ask (almost as a parlor game) others about their first [whatever]: because it was a completely unprecedented experience. If you’re a poet, and you’ve been published, you remember the first time it happened, even if you can’t believe you wrote that silly thing, let alone that someone else printed it. Someone once told me that her first kiss wasn’t a big deal — but then gave details on who it was, where and when it happened, et cetera, which only bolstered my point: you remember your first {whatever] whether it was what you pictured it would be or not.
captcrisis: “But . . .to hear someone say, ‘You are the first to make me feel like I can amount to something!’ or ‘You are the first person I ever had a fulfilling relationship with!’ or “You are the first teacher who actually explained this to me in a way I understand!” The desire to be ‘the first’ in these situations — where pleasure or fulfillment is experienced by the other person (as opposed to, say, being the first to break the other person’s arm) — this is not a desire to be condemned. Perhaps there is an element of selfishness to them, but not all of us are completely altruistic, and if takes a degree of ego to make the effort, then there’s nothing wrong with it.”
Thank you, Capt. Crisis. Whether it was intentional or not, it seemed as though Hugo were trying to invalidate other people’s thoughts and feelings. It’s possible that those who found romantic love/slow dancing/kissing/sex/whatever at an early age (i.e. in one’s teenage years) will find it difficult or impossible to understand the viewpoints of those who’ve waited decades longer.
Lisa KS: “…someone who is a virgin or near-virgin themselves wanting the same, I find quite understandable and sympathetic. Someone who is quite experienced, wanting a virgin…not just wanting someone specific and finding out he/she happens to be a virgin, which is totally fine, but actually wanting a virgin…I think that’s really…repulsive.”
Thank you for distinguishing, Lisa. Yes, I meant someone with little or no experience at romantic love (or what-have-you) searching for someone who’s equally a novice so that they can go through and discover the magic of first love TOGETHER — NOT someone who’s been around the block but expects his (or her) prospective partner to be completely new to everything. I know there are hypocritical men and boys out there like that, and they’re not the ones with the viewpoint I’m passionately defending here.
I’ll also point out again that my viewpoint is gender-neutral, not about the need of a MAN to be someone’s first [whatever].
Hector: “I also disagree with you in that I don’t think that it’s necessarily wrong for a more experienced person to prefer someone less experienced. Perhaps there is from a feminist perspective, but then, I’m not a feminist. It’s simply false that gender is something socially constructed and that men and women are fundamentally the same under the surface. Men and women are different in deep and essential ways, and that’s part of what makes the world such a rich and interesting place.”
Hector, while appreciate that you were supportive of one aspect of my viewpoint, I wasn’t going there. My view on people with little to no experience in X, Y, or Z applies to both females and males in that situation.
If you don’t like the implications of an argument based on evolutionary biology, don’t make one yourself. You were perfectly happy to backhand older women and imply that, in essence, they need to get their wrinkly asses out of the gene pool because men of all ages prefer women in a fixed, younger age group. (You may not have realized it, since you seem singularly unconcerned with what women get out of the bargain, but you’ve also insulted younger men by strongly suggesting they’re heavily outgunned by Dad and have nothing to offer women their own age.)
You’ve chosen, for reasons I can’t fathom, to interpret this as “nobody should be in a relationship with an age gap” or “anyone dating a younger person is an embarrassment to their DNA”. Really, I don’t care if you find the co-ed of your dreams and live happily ever after. I just don’t have any patience for people who can’t own their preferences, but feel compelled to insist that if they like chocolate ice cream, say, Nature Herself has made chocolate ice cream the evolutionarily perfect flavor.
See, I don’t really disagree with you on this. What most people are talking about as unsavory is not “I want to share this with you for the first time,” but the attitude that experience - particularly for women - is actually some kind of contamination, or an upset of the appropriate power balance in a relationship. “I have to be the one who knows the most in bed” or “If she’s had another lover she’s ruined” - THOSE are creepy attitudes.
Re: You were perfectly happy to backhand older women and imply that, in essence, they need to get their wrinkly asses out of the gene pool because men of all ages prefer women in a fixed, younger age group.
Mythago,
I didn’t say that, nor do I believe it. Please don’t attribute to me things I never said. If a guy isn’t interested in having children, and he is attracted to older women, then he should go for it.
Because a woman’s fertility is directly proportional to how much younger than you she is?
Mythago: “See, I don’t really disagree with you on this. What most people are talking about as unsavory is not ‘I want to share this with you for the first time,’ but the attitude that experience - particularly for women - is actually some kind of contamination, or an upset of the appropriate power balance in a relationship.”
I thought I had made clear even in the post that inspired Hugo to initiate this one that I wasn’t suggesting that people or just women are “contaminated.” The double standard of a man wanting “more power” in love or sex than the woman has nauseates me as much as it does anyone else. I believe that neither person should have an upper hand. You should know me better than that, after these years, Mythago: I don’t subscribe to gender-specific constructs.
People do become jaded. Perhaps not everyone, but many people do. I remember overhearing a female colleague — who was likely about 22 or 23 at the time — casually state that she didn’t think she “wanted to try to be in a relationship” that summer, since she figured it might be nice to have a summer without being “encumbered” by having to call someone all the time, and so forth. That’s up to her, of course, but it demonstrates how some people have been lucky enough at love that they’re in the position of taking it for granted and treating it as though it’s a spigot that can be turned off. A person who’s aching to find romantic love for the first time might not find a good match with someone with his/her own protocol, which was developed after dating 200 people over the years. (”I always wait a day and a half after the first date to call, and by the end of the fourth date I usually ask how (s)he thinks it’s going…”) A person may, in fact, want someone who will treat the date with the same sort of appreciation, since BOTH people will have spent numerous teary nights at home, wondering why seemingly everyone else in the world has found some sort of happiness.
None of this has to do with fetishizing anyone’s lack of experience at anything. Any creepiness from here on out will be added by the reader.
I am very happy that I found this site.