Remember that time when St. John Paul II said that husbands shouldn’t be attracted to their wives?That wasn’t actually what he said. But it’s definitely what he was reported to have said. It was the General Audience of October 8th, 1980, in the midst of his “Theology of the Body” talks. The media, who up until that time was pretty much ignoring these addresses entirely, was suddenly leading newscasts with the story, and sending reporters to St. Peter’s Square for “on the scene” reporting. Even I, 17 years old and utterly disinterested in anything that didn’t involve boys or designer jeans, heard about it.

And boy, did it ever cause an uproar. Even now, 46 years later, I still find news articles about it.

So what happened?

Dr. Phil is ruining my life.

His reels keep showing up on my Facebook feed. Upon which I waste far too much time. I have been particularly fascinated by the episodes featuring clearly incompatible engaged couples trying to work out their problems. And I yell “Just break up! Don’t get married! Run!!!”

And then I learn they have three kids together. And a house, a dog and probably a side business. So leaving is no longer an easy option.

Last time we discussed the low divorce rate among couples who save sex for marriage. Now I want to take it one step further and talk about the impact of premarital cohabitation on marriages.

I just read a study that started by saying “Pre-marital sex predicts divorce, but we do not know why.”

The study found that the odds of divorce for these couples are double to triple — increasing as the number of sexual partners increases — over couples who saved sex for marriage. These results remained consistent even after adjusting for religiosity, beliefs and values. In other words, it isn’t just because the “savers” are religious and hence don’t believe in divorce. Nor did they find any gender differences.

The study definitively establishes that yes, premarital sex is a “highly significant predictor of divorce.” But what they couldn’t figure out is “why.”

I may have some thoughts on that subject.

Back when I was giving talks to teenagers, there was always a point in the presentation where the audience knew we were getting dangerously close to discussing s-e-x. At that point, I would say “I know what you’re thinking. ‘Oh no, she’s going to talk about sex. Please don’t let her talk about the details. I get so embarrassed.’  And then, ‘How come I get so embarrassed anyway? There must be something wrong with me, and I’m going to grow up to be some kind of weird, sexually hung up adult.’ And then, ’How does this lady know I think all of this?’”

One mother told me that, after school, her junior high age son ran out to the car and breathlessly said “Mom, this lady knew what we were thinking!”

I knew because it’s normal. Which was why, much to their relief, we didn’t discuss those details. But what we have lost in our society is the sense of why it is normal.

I have made no secret, over the years, that I am a big fan of men. As I have said here before, I like masculinity. I like men’s strength. I like their protectiveness. I like how different they are from me and from femininity in general. I like the way the two play off of each other. I like the way men love deeply, and yet theirs remains a distinctly masculine kind of love.

I think masculinity is one of God’s greatest inventions. And, like all of His inventions, it became vulnerable to distortion after the Fall. That distortion takes different forms in different places and different times. In our era, I think a lot of young men are suffering a profound crisis of meaning.

“Your desire shall be for your husband, and he will lord it over you.” Gen 3:16

I think of all of the beautiful aspects of the Genesis account of paradise, the one I perhaps envy most, is the perfect relationship between man and woman. (I know, walking with God in the cool of the afternoon seems like a pretty good gig, too.) We have talked about how God created them specifically for each other, and how Adam’s masculinity perfectly complemented Eve’s femininity. And about how the love between them was perfect. They were “naked and not ashamed,” completely transparent to each other. All each wanted was what was absolutely best for the other, all the time.

Can you imagine what our marriages would look like if these two hadn’t messed everything up? Perfect love. No disagreement. No boredom. No hurt feelings. No silent seething. No rejection. No long conversations talking past each other, wondering how another human being could see things so differently. No possibility of betrayal, on any level. Just total trust, and total gift, one to the other.

That would be amazing.

I have a friend who had a very sweet and precocious son. When he was very little, she told me “Jack has a question for you.” The question: “Why is God so mean? He wouldn’t even let Adam and Eve eat apples!”

Don’t we all kind of feel that way? I know I did. It took my beloved St. John Paul II and his Theology of the Body to set me straight.

Adam and Eve (and each of us) were created for our own sake, in the image and likeness of God, and loved madly by Him. The love between Adam and Eve was likewise perfect, with each wanting only what was best for the other. He placed them in paradise, where they wanted for nothing.

And he gave them only one rule. “. . . but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for on the day that you eat from it you will certainly die.” (Gen 2:17)

I just finished reading the excellent book “From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life” by Arthur C Brooks. One of my favorite parts was his discussion of the importance of relationships to our happiness. Like many other academics who study happiness, he has found that the quality of those relationships is far more determinative of happiness than wealth, career success or nearly any of the measures we think will bring us satisfaction. In fact, he said that “It’s difficult to describe adequately the depth of the rewards that one enjoys when relationships become your ‘official’ source of meaning and fulfillment.”

Brooks is a Catholic, and at many points in the book, I suspected that he has more than a passing familiarity with St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.

Have you heard? Science has isolated a substance that completely destroys a woman’s sex drive. It’s called “wedding cake.”

So according to the (lame) joke, once a woman gets married, she loses interest in sex. Oddly, statistics have consistently proven this wrong. Back when I was researching these things, study after study showed the same thing:

The most sexually satisfied people in America — the people experiencing the most frequent, most satisfying sex — are highly religious married people who saved sex for marriage.

Surprising. We all think it should be the “swinging bachelor.” But no. It’s the nondescript couple driving their minivan into the church parking lot.

Why?

“And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.” Gen 2:25

Perhaps the weirdest passage in all of scripture. When I was a kid, my cousin used to quote it to explain to me why Playboy magazine was actually a good thing. I remember thinking “I know something is wrong with that. I don’t know what. But when I figure it out, I’m gonna travel all over the world and tell everybody about it.” (OK, maybe I didn’t think that last part. But it really did turn out that way.)

In our journey through the Theology of the Body, we have talked about the importance and dignity of every human person, the fact that we are created to find fulfillment in giving ourselves in love, the nature of love as self donation, and the nature of sacramental marriage as a permanent form of that self donation. Today, through the example of Adam and Eve, we’re taking a closer look at how that self donation plays out — or rather, how it played out in Eden, when love was pure, before sin entered the world and distorted our relationships (and pretty much everything else.) Which becomes the love that, since our redemption in Christ, we can once again strive to live with the help of His grace.

So, let’s talk about nakedness.