"These are the Nineties After All"

Many motion picture and television stars have taken to living together without benefit of matrimony and some Catholics imitate them. "These are the 90’s after all." One gets the impression that God has let his lease on moral norms lapse although there is no termination date stated in the scriptures. For those who are interested in knowing what the law of God is I invite them to look up the following texts: Matthew 15:19; Mark 7:21-23; I Corinthians 6:9-10, 13-18; II Corinthians 12:21; Galatians 5:19; Ephesians 5:3-6; Colossians 3:5; I Thessalonians 4:3-8; Hebrews 13:4; Revelation 9:21. The technical name for pre-marital sex is fornication. In the texts above the word for fornication is frequently translated as "immorality" (porneia in Greek). Living together without matrimony, which is supposed to reflect the new sexual morality, looks rather like the old immorality. What a pity that the bible wastes so much space on moral norms that many in this generation consider no longer valid.

Apart from the biblical prohibitions of fornication there are many reasons for avoiding it. This activity often results in pregnancy with almost totally unappealing options: (1) a "forced" marriage that promotes resentment and an unstable union; (2) an abortion that leaves the blood of an innocent human being on the hands of the couple; or (3) another single-parent household with all the social pathology that results from that. The marriage act represents total self-giving of the spouses. If the giving is less than total with respect to time it is not an expression of total giving but a use of the person. Live-ins say, "I am not willing to marry you but I am willing to enjoy myself with you." This is alarmingly similar to what a prostitute might hear from a client. While conceding that a prostitute is an unlikely candidate for a lifetime partner I think it fair to call living together without marriage an on-going prostitution.

Persons living in immoral unions sometimes answer criticism of their immorality by saying that marriage is only a piece of paper. They love one another just as much as those who have had a ceremony. Unfortunately the love falls short of making a lifetime commitment. No one questions that a mere "piece of paper" is seen to be crucial in other human activities, such as purchasing homes, automobiles, or entering into work or construction agreements. People will not commit their resources or services except in agreements formalized in such fashion that compliance can be forced by law and non-compliance can be punished. Why should anything less than this be required for a commitment that is supposed to last a lifetime and in which the total self is involved? True human love does not tolerate a period of trial, but demands a total and definitive gift of the persons. (CCC #2391)

Live-in partners try to justify their activity by saying, "You wouldn’t buy a car without driving it, would you?" They fail to see that in one case one is acquiring a thing and in another a person. Does one try out a person as one might a thing? Since the giving in live-in arrangements is by definition and agreement not total, the partners are actually reducing each other to the status of a thing and, perhaps trying out the new "thing" is an exercise in consistency. Few of these trials, which live-in partners hold as essential, result in good marriages. The divorce rate of marriages after a trial marriage is fifty to one hundred percent higher than with the non-trial group in studies cited by Axinn and Thornton that appeared in the quarterly Demography. The University of Wisconsin’s National Survey of Families and Households reported that out of 100 trial marriages only 15 develop into lasting marriages. How long could a manufacturer stay in business if his products had an 85% failure rate? About the only thing that trial marriages prepare one for is another trial marriage. In addition to the miserable marriage record of live-ins they are not overwhelmingly happy during the trial period. The Justice Department in its 1992 study, "Female Victims of Violent Crime," reports 56,000 wives were assaulted by husbands during any year in the 1980’s. But 3 million cohabiting women had 198,000 cases, four times as many as from 53 million married women. One in 15 cohabiting women is assaulted as compared with one in 946 for wives, a ratio of 63:1. To paraphrase Voltaire, if we did not have a divine ban on fornication we would have to invent it.