Good sex: why we need more of it and a lot less of the bad stuff.(Cover story)

Lots of Americans today--young and old--are coping with deep problems related directly or indirectly to sex. Many have been burned by current sexual practices--such as hook-ups that create emptiness, or cohabiting relationships that go nowhere--and are looking for new ways to build a loving physical relationship with a member of the opposite sex. Many would welcome, more generally, a fresh way to strengthen their relationships with loved ones. They need some help balancing not just "love and career," or "work and family," but some even bigger things. Their desire for independence and autonomy must be balanced with their equally important longings for interdependence, closeness, and even neediness at times. Men and women alike would love to find an alternative to the sterile "struggle for equality" in relationships. They have an intuition that freedom is something more profound than just the right to do as you please, but they aren't quite sure what that deeper secret might be.

Finding true love, good sex, and spousal happiness is not easy in modern America because we are working with a batch of concepts that are actively in our way. Today's favorite ideals of equality and freedom, however attractive and appropriate in the political or economic realm, are not adequate bases on which to build happy home lives. Love relations and family life are distinct social spheres that need concepts and ideas of their own, not just hand-me-downs from politics and economics.

And there is much more at stake in the successes and failures of our love lives than just personal happiness and private feelings. It matters to the rest of the world whether we succeed at sex, love, and family life because bad sex, bad love, and bad family life often produce bad children.

A free society needs people with consciences who can control themselves and use freedom without bothering other people too much. Research shows that the groundwork for the conscience is laid during the first 18 months of our lives, in our relationship with our parents. Without that foundation, a child is much more likely to grow up without an ability to govern himself. Thus, your ability to succeed at sex, love, and marriage has the potential to strengthen a free society, or significantly weaken it.

You might object that not every couple has children. Maybe you yourself don't. But there is a second reason your marriage matters to the rest of the world, a reason that is independent of children. Human sexuality is the great engine of sociability. Sexuality builds up the relationship between the couple, and this relationship then becomes the basis of higher society.

The widespread disappointments in family life since the 1960s are predictable consequences of some very dumb ideas. In the last half of the twentieth century, we distilled from the Western tradition of freedom a peculiar elixir of pure sexual and personal freedom. We came up with the idea that freedom means being completely unencumbered by human relationships. A person is free only if he or she avoids relationships that generate financial, sexual, or parental dependency. A person, it is claimed, is not free if he or she must be responsible for an unexpected child. A person is not free if he or she feels pressed to remain married.

A society that defines freedom in this way--as the absence of totally committed human relationships--will not remain free. Only by meeting obligations to each other do we produce a new generation deserving of liberty, and able to exercise it responsibly. Moreover, individuals who define freedom in this commitment-free way are abandoning the very thing that has the best chance of making them happy.