Latest / The Lila Rose Show / E312: Relationship Expert: Men Want Traditional Marriage, But Women Want This w/Mark Regnerus | Lila Rose Show

Transcript

E312: Relationship Expert: Men Want Traditional Marriage, But Women Want This w/Mark Regnerus | Lila Rose Show · The Lila Rose Show

• 0:00
  As of 20/25/24, percent of young people reported not having sex
• 0:04
  in the last year, which is a 100% increase from 2010.
• 0:08
  Why do you think this is? Premarital sex is going down,
• 0:10
  but marital sex is going down too.
• 0:12
  But it's all traceable. You've gotten in hot water in
• 0:15
  your career for some of the research that you've done.
• 0:17
  Pill is the thing that really splits the mating market into a
• 0:21
  marriage corner of the market, a sex corner of the market, and in
• 0:24
  this middle ground, it's the market in longer term
• 0:27
  relationships of unclear duration and future.
• 0:31
  What are we talking about in terms of the benefits of people
• 0:34
  who say I'm going to wait until I'm married to have sex with
• 0:36
  you? That variable, the number of
• 0:37
  premarital partners, remains the best predictor of you leaving
• 0:41
  your marriage. Both the men and the women are
• 0:42
  complaining of this. They cannot find a spouse.
• 0:45
  Now there are spouses out there to be found.
• 0:47
  So what's the problem? Two things. 1 is.
• 0:52
  Mark Gregneris, welcome to the podcast.
• 0:54
  Thanks, Lila. So great to see you again.
• 0:57
  We were just talking and spend, I don't know, seven or eight
• 0:59
  years since that fateful conversation.
• 1:02
  I was like, this guy's research is absolutely essential for the
• 1:05
  future of American humanity and probably global humanity.
• 1:08
  So thank you for your work. Happy to do it.
• 1:11
  As of 20/25/24, percent of young people reported not having sex
• 1:16
  in the last year, which is a a 100% increase from 2010.
• 1:21
  Why do you think this is? That's a good question.
• 1:24
  I think it has to do with our retreat into a digital world.
• 1:31
  The kinds of affirmations human beings seek from a loved one are
• 1:40
  being replaced by social affirmations such that it even
• 1:46
  kind of curbs the the sort of generally natural flow of desire
• 1:55
  towards another human being. I know Arthur Brooks is
• 1:59
  crusading on this kind of topic like a lot how to get
• 2:04
  smartphones out of off of the dinner table, out of the
• 2:07
  bedroom, all that stuff. And he's 100% right.
• 2:12
  I mean, it's moving people away from each other.
• 2:15
  Now you can say, wow, some of these people shouldn't be
• 2:17
  together anyways, right? So you could in some ways you'd
• 2:22
  celebrate premarital sex is going down, but marital sex is
• 2:27
  going down too, and Co having sex is going down.
• 2:30
  It's stunning in some ways, but it's all traceable.
• 2:35
  It's all understandable. What you're saying is we're
• 2:39
  replacing sex, we're replacing the most intimate human
• 2:42
  connection with a phone. The phone is basically become
• 2:46
  our partner, our boyfriend, our girlfriend, our spouse.
• 2:50
  It is for some people, that's totally the case.
• 2:53
  For other people, including married people, people
• 2:56
  cohabiting like they, it's an addition, but it's an addition
• 2:59
  that causes a subtraction because it does take something
• 3:02
  away from that other person that you're with.
• 3:05
  So it's totally predictable and people can claim that it's not
• 3:14
  happening to them and they're wrong.
• 3:19
  I mean, it, it does prompt us to withdraw from human beings, but
• 3:26
  it's powerful because it's forever new.
• 3:32
  You know your spouse is the same when you're 3040 plus years
• 3:37
  together. Then you wonder, is there
• 3:40
  anything new here? And if there's something new,
• 3:42
  it's like, oh, it's going to be something difficult, right?
• 3:45
  Not something new and exciting. Whereas technology is always
• 3:51
  sort of has the possibility of something exciting.
• 3:54
  You get the dopamine hit from technology that you don't get
• 3:57
  from waking up and seeing your spouse again.
• 4:00
  You get other. Dopamine in the morning, that's
• 4:03
  for sure, yeah. This is very challenging news
• 4:07
  that I think we all need to be really sober and realistic
• 4:10
  about. It sounds like what you might be
• 4:14
  saying too. Well, you can tell me if this is
• 4:15
  true or not. Pornography, the use of
• 4:17
  pornography for both men and women has skyrocketed in the
• 4:20
  last decade. Child sexual assault material is
• 4:23
  proliferating. Sexual addiction is
• 4:26
  proliferating. And there's a movement against
• 4:28
  that counter movements against the use of pornography and
• 4:31
  certainly against child sexual abuse, which is absolutely
• 4:33
  heinous. But it's still, you know, huge
• 4:36
  problem today. And is that part of this that,
• 4:41
  you know, sex is down? Premarital sex is down 100% in
• 4:45
  the last, you know, decade plus. But people are still sexually
• 4:50
  active. They're just having sex with
• 4:51
  themselves pretty much via a phone.
• 4:53
  Yeah. Yes, that is correct.
• 4:55
  We measured pornography use and masturbation in 20/14/2018 and
• 5:01
  2025 national representative data and between 2014 and 2025,
• 5:08
  you see statistically significant, I'd say at least 20
• 5:12
  to 25% higher use. It's not so much higher use, but
• 5:18
  more frequent use of pornography and also closer to about 10 to
• 5:23
  15% increase in masturbation daily among American population,
• 5:30
  men and women. The weird thing is to weird
• 5:34
  historically is that the correlation between those two
• 5:38
  which we kind of associate one with the other.
• 5:41
  We used to associate them largely with men, but now the
• 5:46
  correlation between those two frequent recent use,
• 5:50
  masturbation, pornography is is is converging, right?
• 5:56
  What does that mean? Meaning it's the the correlation
• 5:59
  between recent pornography use and masturbation for men is
• 6:04
  high. Point 6, you know it's a high
• 6:07
  correlation, but at women's used piece are point 2.3 but it is
• 6:12
  now just under men's. It means that men and women are
• 6:17
  treating that pair comparably. They are replacing real sexual
• 6:26
  expression with this sort of false imaginary, and I've long
• 6:34
  known that was the case with men.
• 6:37
  It was getting more significant over time, but women are
• 6:41
  catching up. So men and women are looking
• 6:44
  similar in this domain in a way that they didn't as recently as
• 6:50
  12 years ago, which is really something.
• 6:54
  Well, let's unpack that for a minute because, you know, we've
• 6:57
  actually had this conversation on the show before about the,
• 7:02
  you know, use skyrocketing use of porn, how it's been affecting
• 7:05
  both men and women. You're saying it's almost it's
• 7:08
  getting to the place where it's neck and neck in terms of men
• 7:10
  and women are both at the same rates, struggling with the use
• 7:14
  of porn and masturbation. Not quite.
• 7:17
  Men's rates are probably twice as high, but I'm saying that the
• 7:21
  correlation, the association of the two, it has increased among
• 7:26
  women such that their behavior is starting to look that of men,
• 7:32
  but it's still notably less. Does it make sense?
• 7:36
  Yes, but I think what you're saying what what it what you're
• 7:38
  saying, and I've heard this even anecdotally when I've talked to
• 7:41
  spiritual leaders who deal with people's confessions and, you
• 7:44
  know, shepherding people with addiction and immoral behavior
• 7:46
  where the amount of women now who are using pornography like
• 7:50
  you're saying, who are masturbating, etcetera, it's
• 7:52
  grown dramatically more than seems natural for the natural
• 7:56
  feminine. I wouldn't have explanation.
• 7:58
  Yeah, so it's almost like women are are getting detached women
• 8:03
  who more naturally, I would say in order for them to even
• 8:06
  experience sex in a positive way, they need a relationship.
• 8:10
  I think that's hard wired into women, partly because we carry
• 8:13
  children. So we, you know, the selectivity
• 8:15
  for a mate needs to be higher, you know, biologically because
• 8:18
  we might get pregnant. And now that has been trained
• 8:22
  almost out of a generation of women who are using consuming
• 8:25
  porn because it's no longer like I need a relationship and feel
• 8:29
  safe and secure with this man who loves me.
• 8:31
  Now it's like I'm actually just going to imagine connection with
• 8:34
  this man on the screen basically.
• 8:36
  And that's going to be enough for me to, you know, basically
• 8:41
  do this sexual act. It's, I think it doesn't operate
• 8:45
  quite the same for men and women.
• 8:47
  But when a, a share of men have completely disengaged a fair
• 8:52
  amount, then you there's, there's the counterpart to that.
• 8:58
  There's a bunch of women out there who are not engaging them
• 9:01
  somehow or not being engaged. So they can either circulate
• 9:07
  among a handful of men who are just trafficking in lots of
• 9:12
  different women. They just, they, they don't have
• 9:16
  relationship material in front of them.
• 9:18
  And so the entire pornography industry is clever about what
• 9:24
  attracts women, which may not attract men.
• 9:28
  So they give them what they're looking for.
• 9:30
  I mean, there's a profit underlying profit and market
• 9:33
  motive in all this, which has always been there.
• 9:37
  And for women, what is it? How is it different than men?
• 9:39
  What women are looking for in terms of.
• 9:41
  It's not pornography, it's much more relational oriented, soft
• 9:46
  core, all that stuff. It's like it.
• 9:49
  It appeals to that which we might expect women to be
• 9:54
  interested in. I mean, I think about all of the
• 9:58
  smut novels today. I mean, that's a point in my
• 10:00
  view and it's everywhere. It's on any book.
• 10:03
  It's at a library. There's you find in the teen
• 10:05
  section of the library. The 50 Shades thing I wrote
• 10:08
  about that, I don't know, one or two books ago, and that captured
• 10:14
  such an audience. And I thought, OK, somehow that
• 10:20
  narrative is resonating with women because it wasn't men who
• 10:23
  went to buy the novel and read it.
• 10:27
  So it was obvious that you've got a lot of attention being
• 10:35
  turned away from human beings by men and by women onto
• 10:41
  imaginaries, right? They're still relationships of a
• 10:44
  nature. It's just it's not with a human
• 10:47
  being. So it's not how.
• 10:51
  It's not how we did it for millennia, a very long time,
• 10:57
  right? It feels like we're priming
• 10:59
  ourselves for relationships with robots.
• 11:04
  Yes, I think they'll be a little bit different for men and women,
• 11:07
  but it remains to be seen. I'm not convinced that it will
• 11:14
  happen quite like we might imagine.
• 11:19
  When the movie Her came out probably 15 years ago, I watched
• 11:26
  it and I thought, OK, is that going to be, is that going to be
• 11:28
  how it's going to be that an operating system kind of becomes
• 11:33
  tailor made? So now that we're in that
• 11:36
  position, but 15 years on, I still don't see that it's going
• 11:39
  to become a a major thing. The sex doll industry, I think
• 11:45
  that was that never went mainstream.
• 11:49
  I don't see how robots are going to go mainstream in this domain.
• 11:54
  But I do think that one of the key risks is chat bots, right?
• 12:02
  Converse for women conversation with somebody online, fake or
• 12:07
  real with men. You know, you have is it I
• 12:13
  forget which company, but they're wrestling with OK, are
• 12:16
  we going to introduce create your own porn or not?
• 12:20
  You open that door and that's that's going to be hard to
• 12:23
  close. Well, I think about Only Fans
• 12:26
  and only fans is basically a chat bots.
• 12:28
  I mean, that's what the pornographers on there do, is
• 12:32
  they create basically like systematic.
• 12:34
  They can create systems and sometimes it's actually them,
• 12:36
  but a lot of time is their bots who engage with the customer to
• 12:40
  kind of engage them in this faux relationship to make the person
• 12:44
  feel special and then obviously giving them like soft porn or
• 12:47
  whatever. And that's effectively a robot
• 12:50
  system. True.
• 12:51
  So what you have with that is this massive removal of people
• 12:59
  from what I would have called the marriage market or even the
• 13:04
  mating market, right? Which is as of human beings
• 13:06
  looking for company of some nature for some period of time,
• 13:12
  including up to including marriage.
• 13:15
  Now we've just got tons of people who are kind of off
• 13:17
  market, which leaves the mating market in general in a weird
• 13:23
  spot. And if that doesn't have roughly
• 13:26
  equal numbers of men and women in it, really strange things
• 13:32
  start to occur. I'd say in the last 15 to 20
• 13:39
  years, you had a significant drop in men engaging that
• 13:43
  market. I think that remains the case.
• 13:47
  Are there women entirely opting out of that market?
• 13:50
  Some. Now, will it match the number of
• 13:53
  men? Probably not.
• 13:56
  But if not, I mean the the underlying message of the book
• 14:00
  Cheap Sex, which came out 2017, is that when you have more women
• 14:08
  in the market than men, power flows to the rare sex and some
• 14:12
  men get what they want. So in the marriage corner of the
• 14:15
  market, women have always felt at a disadvantage because he had
• 14:20
  more options. So you would say today the
• 14:24
  research bears out that there are there are more women in the
• 14:28
  marriage market than there are men.
• 14:30
  Correct. That is, yeah, without a doubt.
• 14:34
  You think about all the times we think about in this church or
• 14:37
  this parish, how many eligible young women do you know versus
• 14:41
  how many eligible men? I mean it it at least until very
• 14:46
  recently when the numbers started pivoting a little bit,
• 14:50
  we always we've always known far more women who are looking for a
• 14:54
  spouse than men. Now I don't think that's
• 14:58
  changed, but men are kind of coming back around a little bit,
• 15:04
  at least into the church. But what we have found is that
• 15:08
  when men re engage in the faith, they're not necessarily engaging
• 15:14
  the women at the same time. And they actually speak
• 15:18
  different things and practice faith differently.
• 15:21
  So men and women inside church or outside church are more
• 15:27
  different in their attitudes towards each other, towards
• 15:32
  politics, towards marriage, towards family then they were,
• 15:35
  I'd say as recently as 15 years ago all.
• 15:39
  Right. What you're saying is extremely
• 15:42
  fascinating. And I know people listening are
• 15:44
  like, I've experienced that there's someone listening or
• 15:47
  they they you're not crazy. And So what you're telling
• 15:50
  people is, yeah, there's more women than men in the marriage
• 15:52
  market. People that actually want to get
• 15:54
  married are, you know, in a place to be able to even pursue
• 15:56
  marriage. You're not like heavily addicted
• 15:58
  to pornography or just like to totally out of their minds and
• 16:01
  no longer wanting to even marry. But you're saying in addition to
• 16:03
  that, the men that are now kind of turning the corner and
• 16:06
  getting back into the faith, there's just like now rise and
• 16:09
  especially male interest in faith and values and commitment.
• 16:13
  Again, when they show up back in the pews, they're not
• 16:17
  necessarily looking for the same kind of marriage that the women
• 16:21
  in the pews are looking for. Or how would you define that
• 16:24
  difference? I would say it's generally the
• 16:28
  case, or at least there are more men who are seeking
• 16:34
  traditionalism, especially in the Catholic Church, than women
• 16:38
  who are interested in historic traditionalism.
• 16:45
  So it's kind of funny. It's like the men are coming
• 16:47
  back, but it's not the way that the women who are there wanted
• 16:51
  it to look like. What do they want it to look
• 16:54
  like? You know, I think they're,
• 16:56
  they're, they're genuinely looking for an equal partner,
• 17:01
  somebody to marry, have a few children with.
• 17:05
  And I think the men who are now returning are looking for a more
• 17:13
  historically traditional kind of marriage, which isn't
• 17:17
  necessarily a bad thing. It's just they're not on the
• 17:20
  same page. At least they don't think
• 17:22
  they're on the same page. The men are more politically
• 17:27
  conservative than the women on average, and yet each of them
• 17:33
  kind of doesn't know how to do this right.
• 17:36
  If you want to have the best phone coverage possible while
• 17:39
  also supporting your values of faith, family, and freedom,
• 17:43
  Patriot Mobile is the option. Patriot Mobile offers the same,
• 17:47
  if not better coverage of all the three major US networks and
• 17:51
  you can keep your number and activate it in minutes.
• 17:54
  And everything is backed by a 100% US based customer support
• 17:58
  team. Get everything you need and
• 18:00
  expect from a top tier service provider while putting your
• 18:03
  money towards values that you believe in.
• 18:05
  So right now, go to patriotmobile.com/lila or call
• 18:09
  972 PATRIOT. That's 972 PATRIOT with code
• 18:14
  Lila and you'll get a month of free service.
• 18:16
  Shop America shop.freedom@patriotmobilethatspatriotmobile.com/lila
• 18:21
  or call 972 PATRIOT with code Lila for a free month today.
• 18:27
  Figuring out the right daily nutrition can feel overwhelming,
• 18:30
  but one thing that that I consistently rely on are the
• 18:33
  supplements from WE heartnutrition.com.
• 18:35
  I'm a huge fan of WE Heart Nutrition.
• 18:37
  It is a pro-life family owned business that donates 10% of
• 18:41
  every purchase to pro-life causes.
• 18:43
  WE Heart Nutrition makes premium research backed supplements here
• 18:47
  in the USA for men and women at every stage of life.
• 18:51
  In the supplements most bio available form for maximum
• 18:54
  absorption and digestion from preconception to pregnancy,
• 18:58
  postpartum, menopause and more. I personally take.
• 19:01
  The post Natal supplements and have been taking them since I
• 19:04
  gave birth to our last baby and it has helped me feel healthier
• 19:07
  than ever after my last pregnancy.
• 19:09
  You can take WE Heart Nutrition's two-minute quiz to
• 19:11
  figure out which supplements can best
• 19:13
  benefityourstateoflife@weheartnutrition.com and use the code Lila for 20%
• 19:18
  off your order. That's WE heartnutrition.com and
• 19:22
  use the code Lila for a full 20% off your order.
• 19:25
  Here you have sort of the distinction between what we used
• 19:29
  to call foundational marriages when you married relatively
• 19:32
  young, between the ages of 18 and maybe 25.
• 19:36
  And then it's it's not, it doesn't turn a corner on a dime.
• 19:41
  But like the closer you get to 30 and you you get married
• 19:46
  around 30, it's no longer a foundational marriage because
• 19:49
  you have already completed your education.
• 19:53
  You're probably in the workforce earning decently.
• 19:57
  That's more of a capstone kind of marriage where's you're
• 20:00
  looking for marriage as a capstone to a well lived young
• 20:05
  adult life. So once you're in that boat, the
• 20:15
  men coming into that marriage market at 30 probably think more
• 20:22
  like the foundational, at least mentally the women have
• 20:25
  experienced. The capstone, they are working
• 20:30
  professionals, etcetera and they don't want to feel like they're
• 20:36
  going back to sort of just be in the household raising children
• 20:40
  like that's just because they haven't done it yet.
• 20:43
  And they're now they're 3035 years old.
• 20:46
  So I think the marriage market now in the 30 somethings in
• 20:54
  Catholic and evangelical churches, it's probably a little
• 20:58
  stranger than it was 20 years ago.
• 21:02
  Not that long, right? We're glad the men are kind of
• 21:05
  coming back, for sure. I think the dynamics around
• 21:10
  dating are not necessarily smooth, but we're glad they're
• 21:17
  back. That is a very well said and
• 21:20
  also the last bit of the understatement of the year for
• 21:23
  sure. People listening are like, for
• 21:26
  sure not smooth. I mean, there's we hear so many
• 21:29
  struggle city messages from our single friends on the show and
• 21:33
  just in real life who want to get married.
• 21:37
  They're trying to live a good life.
• 21:39
  They're trying to seek after God.
• 21:41
  They're going back to church. But they both the men and the
• 21:44
  women are complaining of this. It's not like just the women
• 21:46
  complain. They're both complaining of
• 21:48
  this. They cannot find a spouse.
• 21:51
  Yeah, now there are spouses out there to be found.
• 21:54
  So what's the problem, right? Two things.
• 21:58
  One is it's probably it's no help to say this to a 30 or 35
• 22:03
  year old or 40 year old. There's a lot of those listening
• 22:06
  right now. When you are married at 20 to 25
• 22:11
  or 18 to 25, you are have limited your pool early.
• 22:17
  You have seen a handful of people maybe, maybe and you've
• 22:22
  made your choice early. Was it a great selection?
• 22:28
  It can be not necessarily. I mean it's it's you have made
• 22:33
  your decision early when you're making your decision 15 years
• 22:37
  later where they elective or not, right.
• 22:41
  Most people didn't intend to wait that long.
• 22:44
  You are making your choice after having experienced a lot of a
• 22:48
  independence B different kinds of people.
• 22:51
  You kind of know what you like when you don't like.
• 22:53
  So you're choosing from a different standpoint, mental,
• 22:58
  emotional, spiritual, physical than you would have if you were
• 23:03
  choosing when you were 2022. Yeah, I, I think there's plenty
• 23:06
  of women who say they can't find men, but there's definitely men,
• 23:10
  faith-based, values based men who say they can't find women.
• 23:13
  We have a call in show that we've done sparingly, but we've
• 23:15
  done a few times here. And we had one caller, gentleman
• 23:19
  from I think California, and he was, I think late 20s, maybe
• 23:23
  very early 30s. And he just said, I can't find a
• 23:25
  single woman where I live that shares my values and I want to
• 23:29
  get married. And I was like, there's so many
• 23:31
  women out there, trust me, like go to church, blah, blah.
• 23:34
  But that was his experience, right?
• 23:36
  So. Well, it depends on what his
• 23:38
  values are, right? We don't know them.
• 23:39
  We make positive assumptions about those.
• 23:42
  But it could be that he has met them and they're not, they're,
• 23:46
  you know, they're kind of, they recoil at some of the things he
• 23:48
  might think and say and want. I don't know.
• 23:55
  But one of the things that remains true in this is the men
• 23:59
  who kind of engaged the market in their late 20s, mid 30s are
• 24:06
  engaging it at a time when they are dramatically outnumbered by
• 24:10
  women looking for them. And so they feel like, oh, I've
• 24:15
  waited. I haven't found the right woman.
• 24:17
  But in in, in general, they have become pickier than they would
• 24:21
  have been if they were at 20. OK, I remember this story from
• 24:28
  one of the previous books I wrote.
• 24:30
  This guy wrote me and he said he must have been thirtyish, a
• 24:37
  little over 30. And he was very disappointed to
• 24:41
  find that this woman who he had met and fallen in love with
• 24:45
  revealed to him that she had slept with somebody back when
• 24:47
  she was 23 or 24 or 25. And he had not done that.
• 24:52
  And so he was just sort of revolted by this fact.
• 24:58
  I basically upbraided the guy over e-mail.
• 25:01
  I said, you have operated from a position of power in this market
• 25:05
  that he didn't know about for years.
• 25:09
  And then all of a sudden, you expect the behavior of, of women
• 25:15
  to have been conducive to waiting for you, right?
• 25:21
  And along the way, women are making all sorts of decisions,
• 25:26
  including compromises, thinking like, could this work?
• 25:29
  Could this might this be the one?
• 25:32
  Because men will always press women towards a quicker sexual
• 25:35
  relationship on average. Maybe not that guy, but that guy
• 25:41
  is irritated that some woman made a compromise at some point
• 25:44
  in her adult life. And I think, you know, that's
• 25:47
  ridiculous to expect that you will find everything you want,
• 25:53
  right? And indeed, you know, I'm not
• 25:56
  sure I'd marry that guy if I was a woman because his standards
• 26:00
  for somebody's entire past are pretty high, right?
• 26:07
  So I, I had no sympathy for the guy.
• 26:09
  He thought I would, but I didn't.
• 26:11
  So I think a lot of people are in this boat where the 20s in
• 26:16
  which people, most people think they're going to get married
• 26:21
  have become very difficult to navigate, probably especially
• 26:26
  for women, because they know how guys are and they have entered
• 26:32
  into some relationships. And you think, ah, this could be
• 26:35
  going somewhere. And you think about the guy and
• 26:38
  like, OK, I can make it work. You know, he fits the bill,
• 26:42
  something like that. Meanwhile, you know, like, well,
• 26:47
  it's not exactly what I was looking for, but I too have
• 26:51
  known marriages that turned out well, that didn't you know, they
• 26:56
  had an enough an auspicious beginning, right.
• 27:00
  So lots of marriages start in ways that the church may not
• 27:08
  approve of, but they can still get there.
• 27:12
  But if you're 30 or 35 and you're demanding people's pasts
• 27:16
  to look the way you want them to, that's that's a non starter.
• 27:22
  Those are strong words said from a very wide sociologist and a
• 27:27
  man of faith. But I, I, I agree with you.
• 27:30
  I know that some people listening might not agree
• 27:32
  because there's, I think there's a sense that if I was pure, if I
• 27:37
  really intentionally avoided sexual, you know, sex, you know,
• 27:42
  before the age of 30 or the age of 35, then I am owed somebody
• 27:46
  who also I desire somebody. I'm owed somebody who also had
• 27:49
  those standards. Now, I do want to put a caveat
• 27:51
  there that a lot of like this man in this scenario, I don't
• 27:54
  know, but I would guess that he may have had an incident with
• 27:59
  pornography. And, you know, Jesus Christ, our
• 28:02
  Lord and Savior says that if you even look at a woman with lust,
• 28:04
  it's like you've committed adultery with her in your heart.
• 28:07
  And so I think there's also this sort of misapplication where we
• 28:10
  prize physical virginity in a way that we do not also prize
• 28:15
  virginity of the heart or the eyes, which our Lord himself
• 28:19
  annihilated the difference in terms of the morality.
• 28:23
  And I think that's a really, you know, that's a, that's a strong
• 28:27
  message of the Christian faith. Now, traditionalists who maybe
• 28:32
  don't as fully appreciate that the Christian, you know, the
• 28:35
  words of Christ there, but they were like, well, traditionally I
• 28:37
  want a virgin. Traditionally, like I need a
• 28:40
  woman who's a virgin, especially if I am again, is it fair to
• 28:46
  fault him so much? The man who, who, who, who?
• 28:49
  Who asked for that? Is it fair to fault him?
• 28:52
  He he may want good things. The vibe I got from him was that
• 28:58
  he felt like he was owed good things.
• 29:00
  And I think that's not the right position to take.
• 29:10
  That's a, there's a lot of life in the 20s, you know, 3600 plus
• 29:18
  days in the entire decade and another that in the in the 40s
• 29:23
  or the 30s. So there's a lot of time that
• 29:26
  happens. And so a lot of grace has to
• 29:31
  happen, frankly. For both, Yeah.
• 29:35
  And this is men and women. Yeah, and that the terrain is
• 29:38
  different, right? So you talk about our Lord's
• 29:42
  words around lust. Totally true, totally accurate.
• 29:47
  And yet the, the spectrum of what constitutes pornography is
• 29:55
  no longer even clear, right? Because Facebook reels YouTube
• 30:02
  that I they, they tried to, they don't really have pornography,
• 30:06
  but they kind of do, right? Because, yeah, I mean, it's and
• 30:10
  I think actually that stuff can affect women perhaps more than
• 30:16
  effects men. But it, there's a spectrum of
• 30:19
  the porno pornographicization of online life, even sort of our
• 30:28
  obsession with photographs, right?
• 30:30
  This is more women than men, right?
• 30:33
  Men life photographs. Who cares, right?
• 30:36
  Women just love photographs, right?
• 30:38
  Like who knew that the camera invented 100 and some odd years
• 30:41
  ago would be so popular today? We're image drawn in different
• 30:52
  kinds of ways, but that's still it's different than the real
• 30:56
  thing. So men and women have their
• 31:02
  they're crosses to bear in this domain.
• 31:05
  They overlap, but they're distinctive.
• 31:12
  And it calls back to mind the idea that relationships need a
• 31:18
  lot of grace and forgiveness. The entire spectrum of 1's life.
• 31:27
  And then you can go back to it's like, well, how do parents raise
• 31:29
  children? And then like parents,
• 31:32
  increasingly they don't know what to tell their children
• 31:34
  because it's such a environment saturated and difficulty for
• 31:39
  them as adults. Yeah, in some ways we're just
• 31:46
  trying to get by and to raise our children to help them
• 31:51
  navigate the world. But knowing that, you know they
• 31:54
  will need mercy and grace and exceptional quantities like we
• 31:59
  all do. Is there a problem with people
• 32:03
  having premarital sex that you've studied, and what are
• 32:06
  those problems? Having consecutive partners, how
• 32:12
  many does it matter? Does it does it matter how many?
• 32:18
  Women always undercount partners?
• 32:20
  Men tend to overcount them because men don't care as much
• 32:25
  and they calibrate these things differently in their head.
• 32:31
  But each additional partner that you have sort of makes it easier
• 32:35
  to leave your marriage in the future.
• 32:38
  Yeah. National study of family growth
• 32:42
  federal data set issued every few years.
• 32:44
  Very good. That variable, the number of
• 32:50
  premarital partners, remains the best predictor of of of of you
• 32:56
  leaving your marriage. So I mean, going back to the
• 33:00
  conversation we were having about the man who sent you the
• 33:02
  e-mail and he was a virgin and he wanted to be with virgin.
• 33:05
  He found out she wasn't and he was like super disappointed and,
• 33:07
  you know, thinking he he needs to be a virgin.
• 33:10
  If I'm going to Mariner, you know, if he was sitting in the
• 33:12
  room right now, he'd be like, see Professor, you know, she's.
• 33:15
  More likely to divorce me. If because she had, you know, a
• 33:18
  sexual sex with somebody before I.
• 33:20
  Don't think it works quite like that.
• 33:24
  And it's not just because like 01 premarital partner doesn't
• 33:27
  matter. It can in this woman's case,
• 33:33
  from what he described about me, about her to me, I think she was
• 33:39
  at very low risk of of leaving her marriage, her future
• 33:44
  marriage. It's a different thing when you
• 33:47
  treat your premarital years as somewhat non serious, then when
• 33:55
  you have decided to take a risk that you didn't feel like you
• 34:00
  were wanted to take to see where this union might go.
• 34:04
  And then it doesn't go that way. And then you feel burned by
• 34:07
  that. And you say, I don't, I think
• 34:09
  that was a bad approach. I'm not going to do that again.
• 34:12
  Basically, not all premarital sex is equal.
• 34:15
  Tell me more about that. How, how?
• 34:17
  What are the different indicators of different kinds of
• 34:20
  premarital sex that would mean there's a higher likelihood of
• 34:22
  divorce if that person marries? The timing of it, right, the
• 34:31
  number of partners when in the sort of age span you did this
• 34:37
  because that can be a level of sort of emotional maturity, the
• 34:42
  seriousness of that relationship.
• 34:46
  Did the other person convince you that they were secure and
• 34:55
  this was people can trick each other into thinking the
• 35:00
  relationship is more real than it actually is and that's going
• 35:04
  somewhere when they actually don't have intention of going
• 35:05
  there. So there's a lots of reasons why
• 35:09
  I think premarital sexual experiences can be very
• 35:16
  different from each other. Some not so consequential for
• 35:21
  the long run of your future marriage, some much more
• 35:25
  consequential. Is it a pattern of behavior or
• 35:29
  is it a an unusual diversion from your typical behavior?
• 35:36
  Those things matter for sure. The data treats that all the
• 35:41
  same because the data data analysis can be very because we
• 35:45
  don't have data on OK, this premarital partner.
• 35:49
  What was that about? How long did it last?
• 35:51
  Why did you do this? Federal data sets are not that
• 35:57
  able to pick those apart to decipher the meanings of those
• 36:03
  things. I know you've done more in depth
• 36:06
  research into this question of different kinds of premarital
• 36:10
  sexual coupling and its impact on those people longer term.
• 36:14
  Tell us more about what it means when somebody just has a hookup.
• 36:17
  They've just met somebody and the next night they're in bed or
• 36:20
  the next day they're in bed versus somebody who's been in a
• 36:22
  long term relationship and they think they're going to get
• 36:25
  married. And then, you know, having sex
• 36:27
  is sort of like this capstone to sort of be a, you know, the next
• 36:30
  step towards marriage. Each of them may experience
• 36:34
  regret. Quite a few of both do, but one
• 36:39
  of those displays poor judgement around an, an circumstance,
• 36:49
  right? One night stand, a hookup,
• 36:51
  etcetera, about somebody that you you did not know.
• 36:55
  Well, I mean, that's, that's poor judgement.
• 36:58
  Then it's the person that makes a a compromise when she or he
• 37:04
  thinks this is on its way to marriage and it thinks
• 37:10
  something's got out of hand, etcetera.
• 37:11
  Things like that. That's just fundamentally a
• 37:15
  different kind of experience. I'm not endorsing one versus the
• 37:20
  other. I'm saying they're just
• 37:21
  different and they will have different effects.
• 37:26
  I'd say the one will feel more wounded by this and seek not to
• 37:35
  replicate it again. Where is the sort of hookup?
• 37:38
  So it's a wound, but it's a wound that's more likely to sort
• 37:43
  of remain open and not be closed, healed, etcetera, and
• 37:48
  foster a pattern of behavior that puts them in a very
• 37:51
  different position regarding the sort of ability to marry and
• 37:57
  stay married and to close the door on a different life.
• 38:03
  In some ways, it's not impossible.
• 38:06
  God redeems many things if we cooperate and so, but
• 38:13
  sociologically, psychologically, I think they're different
• 38:17
  experiences. Stay prayed up.
• 38:20
  You've probably heard this phrase, and starting this April,
• 38:23
  you can join Mark Wahlberg on the Hallow app for a daily
• 38:27
  prayer challenge to help you. Yes, stay prayed up.
• 38:30
  This challenge aims at helping us to take up the biblical call
• 38:34
  to pray without ceasing. Not just an occasional activity,
• 38:37
  but make prayer integrated for entire lives.
• 38:40
  When you give God the space to speak, you open up your life to
• 38:44
  His words, His teachings, and His promises for your life.
• 38:47
  So right now, check out hallow.com/lila for a completely
• 38:51
  free three month trial. You'll find the Stay Prayed Up
• 38:54
  challenge and thousands of other resources for you and your kids.
• 38:58
  That's 90 days completely free at hallow.com/lila.
• 39:02
  Our babies deserve the best products and that's why I love
• 39:05
  Every Life. Every Life is the fastest
• 39:08
  growing diaper company in America, Erica with premium
• 39:10
  wipes, diapers and more. Their diapers are supremely
• 39:13
  soft, ultra thin and designed for 12 hours of leak protection.
• 39:17
  I love the simplicity of the branding at Every Life and their
• 39:20
  commitment to no harsh ingredients.
• 39:22
  Every Life's mission is 100% pro-life and Pro Woman and they
• 39:26
  actually donate to pro-life organizations.
• 39:29
  Every Life has also launched Every Life Women which provides
• 39:32
  premium quality feminine products that are toxin free
• 39:35
  right to your door. If you go to everylife.com/lila,
• 39:38
  you can get 15% off every order when you subscribe, plus a free
• 39:42
  jumbo tote and more perks. And Every Life will donate
• 39:45
  diapers to a church or pregnancy Resource Center of your choice.
• 39:49
  That's every life.com/lila. Studies show that 95% of
• 39:54
  Americans have sex before marriage.
• 39:56
  Are there any risks of this that people should know?
• 40:00
  Well, the risk is that way. You could be wrong about the
• 40:01
  statistic. You think it's wrong I.
• 40:04
  Think it's, there's different ways how you can describe it.
• 40:12
  I'd say in the depends on when you marry.
• 40:16
  So the latest data, I have 2025 relationships in America data if
• 40:25
  people marry in their 20s. And so far the people who are
• 40:31
  married in their 20s from 20 to 29 and anywhere in there, the,
• 40:38
  the rate of people who wait until they're married is I think
• 40:45
  almost 20% right, Which is was a lot more than it I think was a
• 40:51
  decade or two ago. Now you can say, oh, we're,
• 40:55
  we're morally improving now. I don't think that's necessarily
• 40:57
  the case. It's there's this kind of a
• 40:59
  diversion going on and we're splitting into different camps.
• 41:05
  Either people start relationships with sex or they
• 41:08
  start marriage with that sort of their their first experience of
• 41:14
  sex with that person. It used to be as some
• 41:21
  relationships progressed either from the beginnings, usually not
• 41:25
  at the beginning, but somewhere three months, six months, 912,
• 41:29
  two years, whatever people would begin a sexual relationship
• 41:32
  prior to marriage. Now it seems to be bifurcated at
• 41:35
  the at the polls in some ways. So I do think more people
• 41:44
  perhaps are taking it seriously now.
• 41:49
  But some of that can also reflect that we're disengaged
• 41:54
  from sexual partnership more than we used to be when we're
• 41:58
  young, right? Because of the phone and
• 42:01
  pornography. So you could say what are we
• 42:04
  talking about sexual intercourse or the panoply of possible
• 42:10
  sexual thoughts behaviors. That's a different thing right
• 42:14
  here. We're talking about people who
• 42:16
  wait until they are married to have sex and it and one of them
• 42:20
  may have waited the other one not.
• 42:22
  Are they virgins? We're not talking about that
• 42:24
  because that's a different story, right?
• 42:27
  We're just saying that union. So you can say 95, I could say
• 42:32
  it's more like 80, but then if you are marrying in your 30s,
• 42:35
  that is less likely to have been the case.
• 42:39
  So. So wait just to break that.
• 42:41
  Down to pinpoint a statistic and then to explain it, right?
• 42:47
  Because it's complicated, right? So just to break down that 80%
• 42:52
  potentially of now you know, people in their if they get
• 42:55
  married by 2980% will have had sex before marriage, but 20%
• 43:00
  will have not had sex before marriage roughly speaking.
• 43:02
  With that person. With that person, OK.
• 43:05
  And that's the important distinction.
• 43:06
  So they may have had a sexual encounter at some point earlier
• 43:10
  and in terms of like sexual encounters via lust, just like
• 43:13
  pornography or something like. This that is probably universal.
• 43:16
  It's largely universal. It's very rare to find someone
• 43:18
  who hasn't had that experience. And not to not to problematize
• 43:22
  this, but maybe I'm stepping on a limb, but a woman whose new
• 43:30
  husband has never looked lustfully at a woman is is.
• 43:37
  Married to. Saint Joseph normal in some
• 43:39
  ways, right? She she might say this guy is
• 43:44
  unusual, odd, maybe even problematic, right.
• 43:48
  I mean, is he's because he's not like a normal man.
• 43:51
  So I will say that not everybody will want that kind of man.
• 43:58
  I must say he's not red blooded, right?
• 44:01
  Maybe he's not, but can you it's a usual it's an unusual
• 44:04
  experience. I will say that.
• 44:05
  Because I also think there's a distinction between like a few
• 44:08
  moments of lust and then using pornography, masturbating.
• 44:13
  They're kind of sure. So there's like there's, there's
• 44:15
  all of these the differences and the kind of sexual sin, you
• 44:18
  should still confess lust because like Jesus said, like an
• 44:21
  act of lust towards anyone is like an, an act of adultery.
• 44:25
  So like this is a very serious matter.
• 44:27
  But at the same time, you know, you're actually taking it,
• 44:30
  you're acting on it in a very explicit way to like, then seek
• 44:33
  out pornography, then to masturbate, etcetera, etcetera.
• 44:35
  There's a, there's an article I wrote, oh, probably a dozen
• 44:38
  years ago now where I talked about kind of the, the collapse
• 44:43
  and the, the marital ecology that we would have if women
• 44:52
  would hold out for men who never had done these things.
• 44:55
  You know what I mean? That's just not realistic in
• 45:02
  some ways. Now people think that this is a
• 45:04
  crazy claim. I'm just saying the marital
• 45:08
  ecology out there would be would would collapse.
• 45:17
  If women said I want to marry a man who's a virgin, who has or
• 45:20
  who has never looked. At it who?
• 45:21
  Who has done none of these things?
• 45:23
  OK. And increasingly the other way
• 45:28
  around as well. So again, I'm not here to tell
• 45:33
  people what they should and should put up with, especially
• 45:38
  about somebody's past. But I talked about the the
• 45:44
  pornographic double bind. That's the title of something I
• 45:47
  wrote. You can say, oh, I don't want to
• 45:52
  be in a relationship with this man who has this problem, but
• 45:56
  you're in a potential double bind because you leave him
• 46:00
  without being certain that the pool is is much better, right?
• 46:07
  And so it is so ubiquitous in the system that very few men
• 46:15
  have had no experience with it in the past.
• 46:20
  Independent on the present, right.
• 46:23
  It's just a it's a problem that people have to navigate with the
• 46:27
  other right And talk about early and often is a deal.
• 46:31
  Is it a deal breaker? Maybe right, but she has to
• 46:36
  worry. It's like, if it's a deal
• 46:37
  breaker then and I don't have too many deals in the offing,
• 46:42
  right? What do you do?
• 46:44
  It's a very difficult situation. We can talk about it in
• 46:50
  idealistic ways as a sociologist who lives in data, like we'd
• 46:56
  have to be realistic about what's possible.
• 46:59
  What I've actually told him on the show, we've had guests tell
• 47:01
  women on the show, there seems to be a bit of agreement on this
• 47:04
  among spiritually wise guides and relationship expert types.
• 47:08
  And I agree with this myself, is when it comes to women and
• 47:12
  they're, you know, trying to seek out a good partner.
• 47:15
  Again, this standard applies 100% to them too.
• 47:17
  It's like they can't apply the standard to themselves.
• 47:20
  But in terms of seeking out a partner that will be a
• 47:23
  trustworthy, committed, not looking at pornography in their
• 47:27
  marriage, a good rule of thumb is you want someone who has been
• 47:30
  porn free for at least a year so they can prove that they can
• 47:36
  stave it off. Now, this is not meaning they
• 47:37
  never have a lustful moment, maybe walking down the street,
• 47:40
  but they have not actively looked at masturbated to
• 47:44
  pornography in a year. They likely have in the past.
• 47:47
  Like you said, it's it's so ubiquitous, you know, like at 10
• 47:50
  years old, you're being exposed to it and on average in our
• 47:53
  culture today. But that they've made a effort
• 47:56
  as part of their own character formation and their suitability
• 47:58
  to be a husband, to reject this practice, even though they may
• 48:01
  have had it in the past. And they're like clean of it for
• 48:04
  a year. And my understanding is for
• 48:05
  seminary to become a priest because?
• 48:08
  A very, very different kind of experience, right?
• 48:12
  It's, it's different in that you're going to be celibate, but
• 48:14
  it's the same in that you have to be chased.
• 48:16
  You have to be chased in marriage, you have to be chased
• 48:18
  in the priesthood or, you know, the, the, if you're a woman,
• 48:21
  female religious. And similarly, my understanding
• 48:23
  is if you have a man seeking seminary, you know, because he's
• 48:26
  coming from the same, you know, crashed out culture that we're
• 48:29
  in that we're all swimming in. He also needs to be free of an
• 48:32
  addiction, like not be active in an addiction sexually and also
• 48:36
  to have not looked at pornography generally for a year
• 48:38
  is what they look for or more. So it's almost like we're asking
• 48:42
  survey questions to potential marriage partners, which is a
• 48:45
  little weird. I mean, that's what we had Adam
• 48:47
  Lane Smith on the show. It was phenomenal.
• 48:50
  By third date, he said you have to ask not like, do you look at
• 48:53
  porn, but you should be like, say, what's your view of
• 48:55
  pornography? Is that part of your like, you
• 48:58
  know, bring up the topic? No, I think it's, it's, it's
• 49:01
  helpful to me. I, I approach things from two
• 49:07
  different methodological standpoints. 1 is survey data is
• 49:10
  helpful for a kind of a 30,000 foot view, but to go in depth
• 49:15
  with people, I always like to have conversations, what is the
• 49:18
  meaning of things, the context for things, etcetera.
• 49:23
  So to do a deal breaker that's based on a survey question is a
• 49:26
  little tougher I think in some ways than to to have a
• 49:29
  conversation with somebody about that.
• 49:33
  So. Meaning they you need context.
• 49:35
  You need context. 100% I. Think so, yeah.
• 49:38
  Right. But then there's a certain level
• 49:40
  of context that like, well, I was really depressed and I was
• 49:43
  at my lowest low and I basically look up porn at least once a
• 49:46
  month. That context tells you something
• 49:48
  like this is an ongoing, you know, depressive episode or some
• 49:52
  sort of other need that's not met in their life that.
• 49:55
  They sought help for it. Exactly.
• 49:56
  Can you get help for the mountain of men and women who
• 50:02
  would, if they were honest, confess it right?
• 50:06
  And I think there's not nearly enough supply of for that.
• 50:11
  I agree. I completely agree.
• 50:14
  And it makes people feel more helpless.
• 50:17
  And then there's that downward spiral.
• 50:20
  We have Covenant Eyes as one of our show sponsors, great tool to
• 50:24
  help people. Agreed.
• 50:25
  And then Exodus 90. And there's others.
• 50:27
  I'm on board except for the cold showers.
• 50:30
  I just can't do that. I have a bridge too far, I know,
• 50:34
  especially if as a woman I'm like a cold shower.
• 50:36
  That's like sleeping on a bed of nails over here.
• 50:39
  What would you say to people that say that the Christian
• 50:42
  understanding of sex is outdated?
• 50:44
  And then I want to want to dive into like, OK, what are they
• 50:47
  think that the Christian view is right?
• 50:50
  Is it just sort of like, no, no sex until marriage and then
• 50:53
  after that you do whatever you want.
• 50:54
  I mean, we haven't gotten we haven't dug into the what are
• 50:58
  acceptable and unacceptable sexual practices within
• 51:01
  marriage. I mean, there is wing of
• 51:03
  Christianity that says, you know, marriage is the sort of
• 51:07
  the light switch for anything, right?
• 51:11
  And I don't think that's true, right.
• 51:15
  So I think one of the things you'd say is the security in
• 51:25
  marriage of a sexual relationship is it's a comfort,
• 51:33
  it is the the time in which you feel most known, loved,
• 51:38
  vulnerable, secure. But even that has to be within
• 51:48
  boundaries. Is anything permissible within a
• 51:52
  marriage anything sexually? Like, I think there's lots of
• 51:55
  things that aren't permissible sexually in a marriage that
• 51:57
  aren't affirming of the other and of the union.
• 52:02
  So it'd be tough to kind of understand.
• 52:04
  Well, what do people think that marriage could and could not
• 52:09
  tolerate in the domain of sexual expression?
• 52:15
  Well, let me just say a view, then propose a view and you can
• 52:18
  tell me what you think the culture gets wrong about or
• 52:24
  what, what would you say to the people who don't like this view?
• 52:26
  So I'm just going to lay out a view of what a Christian view of
• 52:29
  sex is in my in my view. And it's not just my view.
• 52:31
  It's an ancient view, 2000 years old, held by, you know, the
• 52:35
  largest groups of Christians that are united under one
• 52:38
  teaching Catholic, Orthodox. You have to be chased inside and
• 52:42
  outside of marriage. Is wanting the good for the
• 52:46
  other and loving them as an as another, not as a subject, an
• 52:49
  object as a subject. Loving them as a subject, not an
• 52:51
  object. And so sex and sex as a design,
• 52:54
  so you don't get to just redesign sex based on your
• 52:57
  whims. It has a design and it's
• 52:58
  designed for two things, procative and unitive.
• 53:00
  So it can bring life into the world.
• 53:02
  And you have to always be open to that, even if it's not
• 53:04
  physically possible in that act, because the woman is not fertile
• 53:06
  or the maybe the man's not fertile because there's a
• 53:08
  problem. And it needs to be bonding and
• 53:10
  unitive. So it respects the dignity of
• 53:12
  the other. You're coming together in a
• 53:13
  spiritual way to really love each other, not just to have a
• 53:16
  moment of pleasure, although the pleasure is a big part of it.
• 53:19
  And so anything that breaks that design is a no go.
• 53:22
  So that includes things like mutual masturbation that doesn't
• 53:27
  end in full on intercourse. So you're just pleasing each
• 53:29
  other, each other, but you're not opening it up to life.
• 53:32
  It includes certainly anything not exclusive to the marriage
• 53:35
  bed like involving other people, pornography, swinging any other,
• 53:39
  opening it up to any other human beings, non human beings,
• 53:41
  pornography, anything. And it also means that you have
• 53:44
  a tremendous amount of care for the other person.
• 53:47
  This isn't going into like I need to get my fix.
• 53:49
  This is going into and I'm going to love you and serve you.
• 53:52
  And you both want, yes, pleasure for each other, but you most
• 53:54
  importantly want the most intense union you can achieve,
• 53:58
  which is, I think, physical and spiritual together.
• 54:02
  And I think the primary thing they would say is our date is is
• 54:05
  always open, right, Because we. Always open to like.
• 54:09
  The mentality. The contraception stuff is,
• 54:11
  yeah. Yeah, and I'm a convert from 15
• 54:16
  years ago, this coming Easter Vigil.
• 54:19
  And so I remember that mentality.
• 54:21
  It was taken for granted assumption, just assumed, never
• 54:25
  questioned, never thought to question it, right.
• 54:29
  And so I think a lot of the Christian world would look at
• 54:34
  what you just described and say, OK, Lila, I'm with you on a
• 54:37
  bunch of that. But some of that it just it's a
• 54:39
  no go. I don't know why.
• 54:40
  Where do you get those rules from?
• 54:41
  Right, That's how you describe the the the generally Catholic
• 54:47
  and Orthodox understanding. And some evangelicals, too,
• 54:49
  increasing some right more. That's good, yeah.
• 54:54
  Yeah, so the world would get hung up around that, I think.
• 55:03
  And the church has made repeat declarations around this.
• 55:11
  And there's an entire wing of the church that sort of still
• 55:14
  pushing for a greater and greater freedom in that domain.
• 55:20
  We just came through a papacy where some things look like they
• 55:23
  might be vulnerable, but turns out they really weren't.
• 55:28
  And now I think we've got a new Holy Father who's not going to
• 55:32
  push in that direction. So it's interesting that
• 55:37
  publicly, the 14th has the highest approval ratings right
• 55:43
  now around the world, and yet he represents and so far as I can
• 55:51
  tell, endorses and upholds what you described for marriage.
• 56:01
  It's when people get serious about the faith either
• 56:06
  internally as Catholics or externally as looking at the the
• 56:10
  Church and what they and the thing about becoming a Catholic
• 56:16
  that can often get people hung up and I guess Catholics
• 56:20
  themselves hung up and criticize it and think, oh, it's not
• 56:25
  necessary. One of the interesting things
• 56:27
  you go back to the to my vitae and the run up to it.
• 56:33
  Popolo 6 had created this council to to consider these
• 56:41
  matters and they issued in a majority report and a minority
• 56:44
  report. The majority report was, I
• 56:46
  think, endorsed by 60 or 61 out of 65 members.
• 56:50
  And this is matters on sexuality and contraception, correct?
• 56:54
  And that is in the 1960s. So sexual revolution is under
• 56:57
  full way. Yes.
• 56:59
  So the majority report says it's time to pivot a little bit
• 57:05
  towards greater openness to contraceptive uses, etcetera.
• 57:11
  And they list a variety of reasons for this minority report
• 57:16
  signed by four or five people. And Paul the 6th went with the
• 57:24
  minority report, even though, you know, we we frame him now as
• 57:29
  being conservative. He wasn't a terribly
• 57:32
  conservative Pope and and popular not up until this point.
• 57:38
  And so he took the advice of the Minority Report and almost in a
• 57:48
  unbelievable fashion. This has been the Church's
• 57:55
  consistent teaching since that point, right?
• 57:59
  So we've got 6/19/68 Mana Vite, Paul the Six does not write any
• 58:04
  more encyclicals after this. It's like, well, that one didn't
• 58:07
  go down well. Maybe I should just not be
• 58:10
  writing these things. That's still settled church
• 58:15
  teachings and I think it's still here to stay so people can be
• 58:22
  attracted by it. I'd say as many as are attracted
• 58:27
  by it, we have an equal to larger share of Catholics who
• 58:32
  become repelled by it right internally and so.
• 58:37
  The Church's teachings on contraception.
• 58:38
  Correct. Yeah, they are winsome.
• 58:43
  They are challenging. As we've already discussed, they
• 58:47
  can be very difficult. They require great communication
• 58:51
  skills between spouses, and those need to be fashioned
• 58:58
  ideally from the beginning. And I think lots of people in
• 59:04
  the throes of love don't speak rationally and intentionally
• 59:11
  about these things. Premarital courses have been
• 59:16
  mediocre historically. I think we've got some pretty
• 59:19
  good ones now. And A Witness to Love, I think
• 59:21
  we use that in Austin is very good.
• 59:28
  A good premarital counsel sequence would probably have a
• 59:34
  breakup rate that's significant, maybe 10% or something like
• 59:38
  that, because it has engaged people who've come to find that
• 59:42
  they actually don't agree with each other.
• 59:45
  They have major differences they didn't even know about because
• 59:47
  they never talked about it, because they didn't think to
• 59:49
  talk about it. And so a good premarital prep
• 59:51
  would engage people to talk about serious things and what
• 59:55
  you plan to do, what you think about this.
• 1:00:00
  I look back, my premarital prep didn't really do that.
• 1:00:04
  Joe and I, when we were engaged, even before we were engaged, we
• 1:00:07
  were doing premarital meetings with a spiritual guide and we
• 1:00:11
  were just, you know, taking it super seriously.
• 1:00:14
  One of the things we took was this focus called a focus test.
• 1:00:16
  It's like 100 questions that you answer, you and your spouse
• 1:00:20
  separately or you and your potential spouse to be
• 1:00:22
  separately. And there are questions about
• 1:00:24
  everything from lifestyle, finances, obviously view of God,
• 1:00:27
  view of kids, sex, all this stuff.
• 1:00:30
  And you do yes, no, or undecided.
• 1:00:32
  And then you come back together and you see how many of your
• 1:00:34
  yeses align, your nose align, and your undecided align.
• 1:00:37
  Incredible conversations that come from that.
• 1:00:41
  Wait, what? Yeah.
• 1:00:43
  Wait, what? When you thought you had already
• 1:00:45
  like were aligned, But it really gets into those nitty gritty
• 1:00:48
  details. You know, of course Joe and I
• 1:00:52
  were largely aligned beautifully and but it also opened up great
• 1:00:55
  conversations. We could have to go even more
• 1:00:56
  deeper and into being of one mind on these things, but I've
• 1:01:00
  sent that to so many engaged couples or even couples that are
• 1:01:02
  considering engagement to do together to just deep more
• 1:01:06
  deeply understand where we are at together.
• 1:01:10
  I want to ask you about contraception though, because
• 1:01:12
  that is the that's the controversial issue in the
• 1:01:17
  Christian world and certainly in the secular world, because they
• 1:01:19
  think the Christians who abide by no contraception ever are
• 1:01:22
  just insane in the secular world.
• 1:01:25
  But in the Christian world, there's debate on this question.
• 1:01:27
  And I do think you have a interesting perspective based on
• 1:01:31
  all of the research that you've done.
• 1:01:33
  How, in your view, has contraception and its widespread
• 1:01:37
  use impacted the sexual marketplace?
• 1:01:41
  Profoundly so. For one thing, it keeps people
• 1:01:48
  not pregnant and circulating in the market for much longer
• 1:01:54
  periods of time. The market doesn't clear very
• 1:01:56
  well and hasn't for a long time, meaning people remain in the
• 1:01:59
  market, shopping, trying out different people, etcetera.
• 1:02:04
  As opposed to getting married, you're saying?
• 1:02:05
  As opposed to getting married. So the the the mating market pre
• 1:02:09
  pill was much more unified and cleared much quicker.
• 1:02:16
  I think about you know, you had more premarital pregnancies back
• 1:02:18
  then too. For sure.
• 1:02:23
  When my grandparents got married, my uncle was on the
• 1:02:26
  way. This was 1929.
• 1:02:31
  That was a fairly common experience.
• 1:02:34
  Not because people were cavalier about sex.
• 1:02:38
  People are now cavalier about sex because they presume that
• 1:02:44
  pregnancy will not occur. OK.
• 1:02:47
  Or if it does, they can do an abortion.
• 1:02:49
  Exactly. The pill is the thing that
• 1:02:52
  really splits the mating market into corners.
• 1:02:56
  A marriage corner of the market, a sex corner of the market, and
• 1:03:02
  then this middle ground, which is very muddy and confusing
• 1:03:08
  where you have it's the market in longer term relationships of
• 1:03:12
  unclear duration and future where more men would probably be
• 1:03:19
  comfortable than women, but more women are apartment to suggest
• 1:03:25
  it because they think it's pulling the man closer to the
• 1:03:30
  marriage market. Wow.
• 1:03:34
  And so that's kind of what the the pill does, is it?
• 1:03:39
  It means there's a lot more sexual activity going on in the
• 1:03:43
  mating market, but a lot less clearing of the marriage market,
• 1:03:49
  meaning people deciding to marry and getting off the market,
• 1:03:52
  right? And so online dating fosters
• 1:03:56
  that because, well, the profit principle is they don't really
• 1:04:01
  want you off the, the, the, the market, right?
• 1:04:04
  Unlike when they started eHarmony in Southern California,
• 1:04:12
  that was a different project. We are going to try to find a
• 1:04:15
  small number of people that seem to fit you right instead of sort
• 1:04:21
  of like I want to see everybody's picture and
• 1:04:24
  description and swipe left or right on them, which is a very
• 1:04:27
  different experience. But he Harmony wanted people to
• 1:04:30
  get married. That was what they were doing
• 1:04:31
  that for. Now you have companies that they
• 1:04:34
  don't want you to get married. They want you to stay on right
• 1:04:37
  because it's a profitable product for them.
• 1:04:40
  So the pre pill market and the pre post and the pill era market
• 1:04:46
  are very different. The market today has a lot of
• 1:04:51
  confusion in it and a lot of deception in it.
• 1:04:54
  A ton of deception. This is why people have to sort
• 1:04:56
  of say to each other like, oh, I'm only interested in serious
• 1:05:01
  people. Like when a woman says to a man
• 1:05:05
  when they're talking online, I'm not into games.
• 1:05:09
  This just has code for saying I'm not into sleeping with you
• 1:05:12
  quickly and I'm actually serious about something that might be
• 1:05:18
  real and long term and maybe marriage, right?
• 1:05:22
  That's all code for that. There's tons of code language
• 1:05:27
  being circulated and a lot of these people wind up in that
• 1:05:31
  middle part of the the market where you know, she'll suggest
• 1:05:36
  they move in together because she's more likely to suggest
• 1:05:39
  that he's the one who wants it more.
• 1:05:42
  He's like, I'm great because then so habitation is like, in
• 1:05:45
  some ways this man's dreams because I don't have to.
• 1:05:50
  I mean, I can have the the the core sexual relationship and you
• 1:05:57
  know, the love that that can foster between two people and
• 1:06:02
  yet I don't have to have children.
• 1:06:05
  I'm not saying anything about children or a future
• 1:06:08
  expectations or the total relationship that marriage is.
• 1:06:14
  And even fidelity is not necessarily absolute guarantee,
• 1:06:18
  right? He doesn't want the supporting
• 1:06:22
  pillars of marriage. He just wants the core, right?
• 1:06:28
  I'll be with you and we will be together.
• 1:06:30
  We'll sleep together, we'll live life together for a time.
• 1:06:35
  You know, so cohabitation is a weird thing because with the
• 1:06:37
  women suggested, but it's the, the, the man's in some ways
• 1:06:42
  ideal form for that moment. He gets most of what he wants
• 1:06:48
  and she gets the hope of something in the future.
• 1:06:52
  So it's a reflection of women's lack of power in the marriage
• 1:06:55
  market, which totally is the case.
• 1:06:58
  She can't make it happen. He makes it happen.
• 1:07:04
  But he will be patient, picky, fickle, and he knows he has
• 1:07:11
  whether he can acknowledge it. He knows he has power in that
• 1:07:14
  domain, and he can play it like he wants, and he does.
• 1:07:18
  And that causes a lot of women to make serious decisions about
• 1:07:24
  what they're willing to do for somebody they're not married
• 1:07:28
  with. And then she wakes up at
• 1:07:30
  30323436 and she's like given 5/10 plus years of her life to
• 1:07:36
  this guy and marriage it. Still hadn't happened.
• 1:07:41
  And what a painful. Then you have.
• 1:07:43
  Experience, that is. Women who who have given their
• 1:07:46
  entire fertility to one or more men.
• 1:07:52
  Yeah, I've. I've watched it happen.
• 1:07:54
  And it's tragic. They didn't want it to be like
• 1:07:57
  that, but yet it turned out to be like that.
• 1:08:01
  And it's, you know, they may blame themselves, but the social
• 1:08:07
  structure of the mating market at large, and the marriage
• 1:08:12
  corner of it in particular, is not friendly to women because
• 1:08:19
  power flows to who's ever rare. And if there's fewer men in that
• 1:08:24
  market and there are, then power flows to them.
• 1:08:28
  They they kind of tacitly understand that and they
• 1:08:31
  navigate that to their advantage.
• 1:08:35
  And it sounds like you're saying contraception is just a tool
• 1:08:40
  basically that has made it all the more easier for this sort of
• 1:08:43
  market to spring into existence? Yes, in the pre pill market
• 1:08:52
  pregnancy. And pre abortion that used to be
• 1:08:56
  off the table. It used to mean that he had to
• 1:09:00
  be serious about this, and her parents typically were also
• 1:09:04
  serious about this. We don't talk about this, but
• 1:09:08
  all of this seems to be happening and the parents are a
• 1:09:13
  bit player, if anything, in the background where historically
• 1:09:21
  parents are very invested in who their daughters and sons were
• 1:09:27
  dating, right. I remember when my oldest 2
• 1:09:31
  started dating somebody seriously, you know, I was first
• 1:09:35
  in information gathering mode, right?
• 1:09:38
  Tell me more about this person and such.
• 1:09:39
  A and then I wanted to meet them and size them up.
• 1:09:42
  And then and then you kind of way like, OK, this, this looks
• 1:09:46
  good. This is, I'm not sure about this
• 1:09:47
  part. And then you watch the two and
• 1:09:51
  you watch how they navigate each other and how they respect each
• 1:09:55
  other. And then you kind of, you can
• 1:09:58
  sort of see, oh, I like where this is going or I'm not sure
• 1:10:00
  about this. So parents used to be more
• 1:10:04
  involved in the ecology of the run up to children's marriages.
• 1:10:11
  And I think that wasn't so bad, right?
• 1:10:14
  There's a new app that I am on the team of advisor for anyways,
• 1:10:20
  Sacred Spark, and it's designed to solve the problem you're
• 1:10:23
  describing where they have you. I think the population is around
• 1:10:27
  20 profiles that you're presented with.
• 1:10:30
  So you don't get to endlessly swipe yourself to death and then
• 1:10:34
  yours also a matchmaker function.
• 1:10:36
  And the matchmaker function allows within the app.
• 1:10:40
  So I can be on the app, I myself or the parent of the child, you
• 1:10:44
  know, adult child or the aunt or the friend can be a matchmaker
• 1:10:47
  and they can look at profiles that's good to the person,
• 1:10:52
  profiles that they think would be a good match.
• 1:10:54
  This is a good idea because people up to their own devices
• 1:10:59
  think they know what they're looking for.
• 1:11:01
  But then if somebody else who knows them can see sort of some
• 1:11:07
  things that they can't see and can see into relationships that
• 1:11:10
  they can't see. And so matchmakers tend to be a
• 1:11:15
  lot more successful than the self and picking among lots of
• 1:11:20
  options. Totally.
• 1:11:22
  I'm I'm only the successful matchmaker of one, but he was
• 1:11:28
  dating a good friend of mine. He was dating somebody else off
• 1:11:31
  and on. And I didn't think she was good
• 1:11:35
  for him. I didn't think that was would
• 1:11:37
  work. This was, you know, you want to
• 1:11:39
  get married. This is not the person.
• 1:11:41
  But I had to wait until he saw it himself.
• 1:11:43
  I wasn't picking at him, trying to tell him to break up.
• 1:11:46
  But then when he did break up, I had already met this other woman
• 1:11:50
  and I was like, oh, she's great. She's looking for the spouse,
• 1:11:53
  etcetera. Two of them just got to meet,
• 1:11:55
  but I can't do it yet. And then when he broke up, I
• 1:12:02
  thought, OK, I'll wait a few weeks, not long.
• 1:12:05
  But then he said, then he said a few days later, like he had only
• 1:12:08
  gone on another date. And I thought that's a little
• 1:12:09
  bit fast. It's like, OK, if you're ready
• 1:12:12
  to date, I have the person for you and they're still together.
• 1:12:18
  Terry. Yeah.
• 1:12:19
  Eleven. No, 15 years.
• 1:12:22
  Nice job, Mark. It's only 1 success, but it
• 1:12:27
  showed me that matchmakers can see things about people that
• 1:12:35
  they can't see. They know people from different
• 1:12:40
  contexts. Like I trust that person, I
• 1:12:42
  trust that person. They don't know each other.
• 1:12:45
  It's my job to link them and see what happens, and matchmakers
• 1:12:51
  can enjoy it immensely. It's very satisfying.
• 1:12:54
  I wish I could do more of it. Sacred Spark get on binder
• 1:12:58
  singles, get on the app. When, when I met my husband,
• 1:13:02
  there were very, very close friends of mine who basically
• 1:13:05
  said, you've met your husband, you know, they, they got to know
• 1:13:09
  us or there was other context and they just, and that, but
• 1:13:12
  having that community be part of the relationship.
• 1:13:16
  Obviously, I, I believe the same thing, but that confirmation was
• 1:13:20
  such a blessing. And some people struggle even
• 1:13:22
  having a community because they're meeting in a dating pool
• 1:13:25
  and there's no shared context. Not that it can't work.
• 1:13:27
  It can work that way, but it can be tough.
• 1:13:30
  If you think of a surrounding family, though, like they've met
• 1:13:32
  him, they like him and, and contrast that to sort of if you
• 1:13:38
  grew up, you were one of two kids of a of a marriage that
• 1:13:42
  split. You know, the parents are
• 1:13:45
  skeptical about marriage or at least sort of skeptical at any
• 1:13:48
  particular possible marriage partner for their children.
• 1:13:51
  It's an entirely different ecosystem in which you are
• 1:13:56
  trying to find a mate. The one who's looking for a
• 1:14:00
  mate, having experienced a break up with their parents and a
• 1:14:04
  small family, very common experience, doesn't have a lot
• 1:14:09
  of alternative voices or supportive voices or people who
• 1:14:16
  wish him or her well and want the best for him.
• 1:14:20
  You can contrast that to the sort of, if you grew up with
• 1:14:23
  several siblings and the parents are still together grandparents,
• 1:14:29
  you kind of can trust other people's judgements too, right?
• 1:14:33
  You can have a bad date or two with your boyfriend, but then
• 1:14:37
  you can sort of see, oh, they see in him so much possibility.
• 1:14:42
  They may even talk to him. You never know.
• 1:14:43
  It's it's it's it's weird. I wish I had.
• 1:14:49
  I wish I had the future of such a thing, you know?
• 1:14:57
  So in your view dating apps a net net benefit to society or a
• 1:15:02
  net? To society.
• 1:15:04
  To people wanting to. Society probably not great to
• 1:15:08
  individuals depends on how they use them.
• 1:15:11
  There's in some ways it's hard to avoid, right?
• 1:15:14
  So many people are dependent upon that.
• 1:15:18
  I don't blame people when they use them, and fine marriages can
• 1:15:22
  result from them, but the underlying structure of them is
• 1:15:29
  not conducive to the kind of marriage that we're talking
• 1:15:36
  about, right? It's it's meant to privilege
• 1:15:42
  things that are somewhat ephemeral to the marriage.
• 1:15:49
  They kind of signal attractiveness, maybe how much
• 1:15:56
  you've faked looking good, how much you faked your social
• 1:16:00
  status, your economics. I mean, it just comes down to a
• 1:16:04
  small number of variables that we seek to manipulate.
• 1:16:08
  And that's that's not the kind of the way to build a a good
• 1:16:13
  marriage from the start. It can be done.
• 1:16:16
  We have to be honest about it, but I don't think it's a great
• 1:16:22
  design. I kind of wish it didn't happen
• 1:16:25
  like that. Totally agree.
• 1:16:27
  But Sacred Spark is the top of the pack because they have the
• 1:16:31
  20 profile thing, they have this voice memo thing, so they try to
• 1:16:35
  make it more human. So it's not just like a picture.
• 1:16:39
  They have a little video you can do and that matchmaker function.
• 1:16:43
  So they're trying to very intentionally wire in hardwire
• 1:16:47
  in these aspects to make it more human.
• 1:16:51
  It's hard, but I think they're achieving it as best any app can
• 1:16:54
  and that's why they already have it.
• 1:16:55
  They've been out a few months. I already have an engaged couple
• 1:16:58
  and these are like hardcore valued people coming together
• 1:17:00
  that share faith to find each other.
• 1:17:04
  That's great. It's, it's we have to do
• 1:17:07
  something because lots of people who wish to get married are the
• 1:17:11
  victims of this messed up mating market that they didn't
• 1:17:16
  contribute to that they didn't cause the problems for.
• 1:17:23
  So we need to do what we can to help people meet and hopefully
• 1:17:32
  they can overcome sort of the, the challenges of that.
• 1:17:38
  I mean, I didn't live that, you know, I picked in the era where
• 1:17:42
  pickings were slim. So it's psychologically, well,
• 1:17:47
  it was a lot cleaner, right? The good old days you marry.
• 1:17:53
  Some ways, yes. High school sweetheart.
• 1:17:56
  In some ways, yes. In some ways I suppose we didn't
• 1:18:00
  talk as much because we didn't have to.
• 1:18:03
  And so and and so I think getting to know each other took
• 1:18:09
  a lot longer and we didn't have the premarital prep that kind of
• 1:18:15
  made you talk about all sorts of things and then building the
• 1:18:18
  communication skills to navigate difficulties when they came up
• 1:18:22
  because people change. What are we talking about in
• 1:18:24
  terms of the benefits of people who say I'm going to wait until
• 1:18:28
  until marriage to have sex with you or doing a live project
• 1:18:30
  together? It's still death to us part
• 1:18:32
  versus the couple over here that is just let's, you know, have
• 1:18:35
  sex as soon as we meet. Some of it is a distinction in
• 1:18:38
  future orientation, people who sort of privilege early sex
• 1:18:43
  within a relationship or prior to a relationship, A they sort
• 1:18:47
  of understand sex as in some ways kind of this ultimate goal.
• 1:18:52
  Again, I go back to the thing where he's privileging it more
• 1:18:55
  than she is. She thinks it's the way to.
• 1:18:57
  But that's some somewhat changing too, because men, women
• 1:19:01
  are becoming a little bit more like men the longer we can treat
• 1:19:06
  them chemically or otherwise, as becoming more like men.
• 1:19:14
  There's a there's a lack of future orientation to some of
• 1:19:18
  these folks and a kind of understanding like, well, is sex
• 1:19:23
  a bonding core of our marriage? Or is this just sort of a way of
• 1:19:30
  meeting people? And it doesn't matter so much
• 1:19:33
  because eventually we'll meet somebody, have had sex with them
• 1:19:37
  already, and then decide like, oh, actually, I think I can be
• 1:19:41
  together, this person for a long time, maybe even marry, if we're
• 1:19:44
  even talking about marriage anymore.
• 1:19:46
  That's a different mentality than the people for whom this is
• 1:19:50
  the summit of the the core of the the permanent union between
• 1:19:57
  a man and a woman. So that group is putting, they
• 1:19:59
  put sex basically pedestal maybe is the wrong word, but they they
• 1:20:03
  elevate sex. Sex is more special, more
• 1:20:05
  beautiful, more important. For the group that says hey, I'm
• 1:20:08
  going to wait till marriage. Right.
• 1:20:10
  It's instead of saying this is a tool to meet people, right?
• 1:20:14
  Which as long as you sort of make sure it's doesn't yield the
• 1:20:18
  fruit that it could normally yield in a person's life, right.
• 1:20:22
  So it's, it's only by technology that we can do that.
• 1:20:25
  And we've done it very successfully in one sense, but
• 1:20:29
  tragically and on a cosmic scale.
• 1:20:33
  What laws can society pass to get our culture back on track
• 1:20:36
  when it comes to dating and marriage?
• 1:20:38
  In some ways, family law is we've tried a lot of things and
• 1:20:44
  other societies have tried a lot of things.
• 1:20:47
  It's hard to build good families with money.
• 1:20:50
  You can give them tax breaks, etcetera.
• 1:20:53
  I tend to think right now in the United States, the ability to
• 1:20:59
  get a foothold on a, a small house is pretty important for,
• 1:21:03
  for the creation of a family, an extended family.
• 1:21:07
  So I think, you know, there's not so much tax breaks.
• 1:21:11
  Tax breaks are odd. They don't, they don't like
• 1:21:14
  there's not, there's not a reward there that's discernible.
• 1:21:17
  And people don't get excited about tax breaks, you know, low
• 1:21:23
  interest, low, you know, under market mortgage rates to get a,
• 1:21:27
  a starter house, more starter houses.
• 1:21:30
  We barely have any 3 bedroom 2 bathroom houses or three one and
• 1:21:34
  a halfs so builders are some free to build the kind of houses
• 1:21:41
  they want but we we need more starter homes and they just
• 1:21:43
  don't. They don't exist.
• 1:21:45
  But I think low mortgage rates were always helpful, and it's
• 1:21:49
  frustrating to watch my children try to afford a house when, you
• 1:21:53
  know, my wife and I just so happened to buy a house when
• 1:21:58
  mortgage rates were at a historic low.
• 1:22:00
  And so my kid has to pay for a lot more for a house that's not
• 1:22:05
  nearly as big as mine. And literally and figuratively,
• 1:22:08
  across the tracks. What role does sex play in a
• 1:22:10
  successful marriage? It's the glue, it's the bond.
• 1:22:14
  It's it's something that we we can't diminish, but we also
• 1:22:24
  can't sort of put it up on a pedestal for decades and
• 1:22:28
  decades. That doesn't make sense either.
• 1:22:30
  It is, it is sort of the the at the core of the union between a
• 1:22:36
  man and a woman, right? It has reproductive function,
• 1:22:42
  central reproductive function, but that reproductive function
• 1:22:47
  aspect of it diminishes over time with her reproductive
• 1:22:50
  capacity. And so it takes on a different
• 1:22:53
  role over time. Still important, but different.
• 1:23:02
  Not to be neglected, but has to be transitioned and navigated,
• 1:23:07
  so it's important at each stage. What would you say to people who
• 1:23:12
  think that it's unrealistic to wait until marriage to have sex?
• 1:23:16
  I recognize that it certainly feels that way.
• 1:23:20
  I think it, it always benefits people from for the idea of, of
• 1:23:27
  waiting for something that's worth waiting for.
• 1:23:31
  And when we think about dealing with the challenges of the eyes
• 1:23:37
  and the challenges of all sorts of things that attract our
• 1:23:40
  attention to fast from something is good for us.
• 1:23:45
  It makes us better. It makes us capable of doing
• 1:23:47
  things that we otherwise can't imagine ourselves capable of
• 1:23:50
  doing. So fasting from that when you're
• 1:23:55
  not married is is important and can serve great unit of
• 1:24:01
  purposes. Based on your research, how does
• 1:24:05
  waiting until marriage to have sex lead to better outcomes?
• 1:24:09
  One of the the most rudimentary ways it predicts its stability,
• 1:24:14
  and it's predicts a couple who will stay together over the long
• 1:24:18
  run because the number of sexual partners you have premaritally
• 1:24:23
  is the top predictor of the dissolution of a marriage when
• 1:24:27
  you enter it. What advice would you give to
• 1:24:29
  young people who are navigating sex and relationships today?
• 1:24:33
  Know that you are going to meet people who are have very
• 1:24:38
  different values than you, and it will tempt you severely to
• 1:24:44
  compromise your values, no matter if you're a man or woman,
• 1:24:49
  and to to compromise things that you thought were central to your
• 1:24:55
  religious life. And you've got to have a plan
• 1:25:00
  because I think desire can grow around people who are not
• 1:25:08
  necessarily good for you. So it's how you meet people
• 1:25:12
  matters and who you meet. Of course, I've seen this happen
• 1:25:16
  to men too. Men get matched up with somebody
• 1:25:20
  in college where they're attracted to her, but she
• 1:25:25
  doesn't have the, the, the religious commitment that he
• 1:25:28
  has. And all sudden he's sorely
• 1:25:30
  interested in her and tempted and she's willing.
• 1:25:33
  And then they, you know, they have to do heroic things to
• 1:25:37
  extract themselves from that quickly or they'll say, find
• 1:25:42
  themselves in a place where they don't want to be.
• 1:25:46
  Do you think that anger generations might eventually
• 1:25:48
  move back to more traditional relationship patterns?
• 1:25:53
  Tough when we know how to prevent both sexually
• 1:26:00
  transmitted infections, but particularly pregnancies.
• 1:26:06
  The pill infused mating market isn't going anywhere and it's
• 1:26:14
  sort of it's just ubiquitous and taken for granted by so many
• 1:26:20
  that to think that people will do something different, they
• 1:26:25
  kind of have to get off market, right?
• 1:26:28
  Like ultra Orthodox Jews off market, LDS kind of have been
• 1:26:33
  off market in some ways, not as quite as much as they used to.
• 1:26:37
  But in the United States it's sort of it's like a, this is a
• 1:26:40
  still fundamentally semi Christian society.
• 1:26:43
  So Christians don't really think of themselves as off market.
• 1:26:47
  If they thought that way a little bit differently, they
• 1:26:50
  might take that more seriously. Get on Sacred Spark.
• 1:26:55
  Get off market. Yeah, no, it's true.
• 1:26:58
  And you. And that's like, you know, when
• 1:27:00
  we have folks like Adam Lane Smith on the show and others,
• 1:27:03
  that's what they're all talking about.
• 1:27:04
  Like, you have to. It's a selection process,
• 1:27:06
  correct? And if you don't take that
• 1:27:09
  process seriously, you're going to get stuck in a quagmire.
• 1:27:11
  Yeah, because people don't take it seriously and they think the
• 1:27:14
  pool, the world is my pool, right?
• 1:27:17
  They get to college. It's like, OK, everybody's
• 1:27:21
  eligible in my mind. They say, oh, I have my deal
• 1:27:24
  Breakers. Well, deal Breakers can be
• 1:27:26
  thrown out the window quickly if you don't if you're not careful.
• 1:27:29
  I think we get romantic and we think, oh, I'm going to meet him
• 1:27:31
  in the coffee shop. I'm going to meet him at the
• 1:27:32
  grocery store. And yes, that is possible.
• 1:27:35
  But it's much more likely you will meet them through a friend,
• 1:27:38
  through church or through your sacred Spark dating app.
• 1:27:42
  You know your your your Catholic or Christian dating app you.
• 1:27:44
  Know there's no natural way to meet somebody in the grocery
• 1:27:47
  store or at the pool even where especially increasingly, you may
• 1:27:54
  romanticize it. But then, OK, in the moment, you
• 1:27:57
  drop a can of spaghetti sauce and then you pick it up.
• 1:28:03
  Oh, can I get this for you, weirdo?
• 1:28:08
  So you have to realize, like, you have to have two people who
• 1:28:11
  are willing to buy into the romantic idea.
• 1:28:13
  And I think that's increasingly unlikely.
• 1:28:16
  So those aren't the ways people meet.
• 1:28:18
  They don't even think about meeting that way anymore.
• 1:28:21
  Two people. From your research, do you think
• 1:28:24
  that faith-based marriages tend to be more stable?
• 1:28:27
  Sure. How much more stable?
• 1:28:30
  Considerably so, and Catholics are more stable than any group
• 1:28:40
  except maybe LDS, partly because both of those two kind of
• 1:28:46
  proscribed divorce a little differently, but distinctively
• 1:28:51
  so. It doesn't mean that we have far
• 1:28:56
  better rates than active evangelicals.
• 1:28:58
  It's not the case, but it's how you understand marriage and how
• 1:29:03
  seriously you under. How serious do you take the
• 1:29:08
  faith understanding of the marriage that you're in?
• 1:29:11
  And when you say Catholics have these strong outcomes next to up
• 1:29:16
  there with LDS in terms of stable marriages, you know,
• 1:29:19
  rejection of divorce, you're talking about practicing
• 1:29:22
  Catholics. I'm going to guess people that
• 1:29:23
  were married in the Catholic Church, correct?
• 1:29:25
  Not like the sons or daughters of Catholics who were confirmed
• 1:29:28
  or baptized Catholic, but then don't practice.
• 1:29:30
  The era that now doesn't think of it as an ethnicity.
• 1:29:34
  Truly, that's that's a good, I mean, it's true a lot of people
• 1:29:36
  like if they had to answer a survey, they'd say I'm Catholic
• 1:29:38
  because they go to Mass on Easter or on Christmas.
• 1:29:41
  It's shrinking, but it's not gone entirely, whereas
• 1:29:47
  Protestant doesn't. People don't think of
• 1:29:50
  Protestant, if they even know what the word means anymore.
• 1:29:53
  People don't think of themselves actively as that.
• 1:29:55
  They think of themselves as Christian or as evangelical or
• 1:29:58
  something like that. What is your advice to young
• 1:30:01
  people who want to have successful marriages?
• 1:30:04
  You have to begin by saying we're throwing away the key,
• 1:30:09
  we're throwing away the we're taking the, the nuclear option
• 1:30:12
  off the table and we will never go there, right?
• 1:30:17
  Because if you can say you and your spouse can always say like
• 1:30:22
  we can fight like dogs, but we are not splitting right.
• 1:30:30
  Whenever the the possibility is there of leaving, we'd we then
• 1:30:40
  we we're just more apartment to get serious about it at some
• 1:30:42
  point. I know that's a tough one to
• 1:30:45
  hear. It's saved my marriage because
• 1:30:50
  we know like, OK, we're in a rut.
• 1:30:54
  We're, we don't even feel like being around each other.
• 1:30:57
  We're not treating each other nicely for this period of time,
• 1:31:01
  but like, OK, you know, mentally and she knows like, all right,
• 1:31:05
  we're going to deal with this. It's just a matter of time.
• 1:31:08
  And then somebody moves towards somebody and it's and it's
• 1:31:12
  repaid in kind. And we talk, we sit, we go out
• 1:31:18
  and we solve it because believing this was never an
• 1:31:25
  option. So we haven't been Catholic but
• 1:31:28
  for 15 years, but we both had this understanding like this is
• 1:31:33
  a, a permanent union from the beginning.
• 1:31:38
  And if we didn't have that understanding, I'm not sure we'd
• 1:31:40
  be together today. There's too many things that
• 1:31:43
  happen in the marriage and too many difficulties that rise that
• 1:31:50
  you know, you don't know how much you have to endure and put
• 1:31:53
  up with, you know? Is weekly church attendance a
• 1:31:58
  key indicator for the longevity and success of a marriage?
• 1:32:02
  Good predictor, Good predictor. It's a good predictor.
• 1:32:05
  Key indicator, Yeah, and it's a good predictor.
• 1:32:08
  Meaning if you go with your spouse weekly to church, you
• 1:32:12
  will more likely have a strong marriage.
• 1:32:14
  Generally speaking, not entirely.
• 1:32:17
  Some of it involves like, well, what are your, are you going
• 1:32:20
  begrudgingly? I'm dragging them kicking and
• 1:32:24
  screaming. Might break up the marriage if
• 1:32:26
  so, but. It do you intend to be faithful
• 1:32:32
  in your your religious participation in your religious
• 1:32:35
  life, your private religious life, your public religious
• 1:32:37
  life? Yeah, that's a good predictor.
• 1:32:39
  Mark Rickneris, This has been awesome.
• 1:32:42
  How can people find your work? Markrickneris.com has some of
• 1:32:45
  it, austin-institute.org has a bit more, and Googling me, I'm
• 1:32:56
  the only Mark Regnerus in the world so far as I know.
• 1:32:59
  Amazing. You give me hope.
• 1:33:01
  I know that there's a it's a mixed bag, as it always has been
• 1:33:05
  throughout human history. Try to be a realist.
• 1:33:08
  You are very realist, realistic, but I am hopeful because all of
• 1:33:11
  the data shows that you walk, yeah, the straight and narrow,
• 1:33:16
  but you don't do it alone. You do it with other people.
• 1:33:18
  You do it with God's grace. And God does have a beautiful
• 1:33:21
  plan in store. There's going to be hardships,
• 1:33:24
  there's going to be pitfalls, but there's a lot of beauty in
• 1:33:28
  store too. And the end of the path you get
• 1:33:30
  heaven. So.
• 1:33:32
  A big thank you to our channel partner.
• 1:33:34
  EWTNEWTN is the world's largest religious broadcast network,
• 1:33:39
  reaching millions of people every single day with the
• 1:33:42
  beautiful truth of the gospel. You can be the first to watch
• 1:33:45
  new Lila Rose Show episodes 24 hours before YouTube over at
• 1:33:50
  ewtn.com, slash On Demand and on the EWTN app.