Is there life apart from sex? (the transition into manhood should not be sex, but the combination of sex with love in marriage).

The conference was nearing its end when a young man in the back of the hall raised a question that would have better served its purpose had it been offered at the beginning. He spoke of a certain young friend who had been convinced by his girlfriend that sexual intercourse had no place in their relationship prior to marriage. Despite accepting her line of reasoning, this young man was nonetheless despondent. "If I can't have sex," he asked, "what else is there to do?"

There wasn't enough time to answer this question. The conference soon ended and the participants quickly dispersed. But the question lingered in my mind. On one level, the question seems to be completely ridiculous. It's like saying: "If I can't talk about baseball at the dinner table, what else is there to talk about?" Yet it was a sincere question and one, no doubt, that many young men are asking themselves these days.

Our aphrodisiac society obliges men to be sexual conquerors. But it has no script for them to play out either after or apart from that conquering. The message men need to hear, however, is something like this: "Unless you learn how to live a meaningful life apart from that specific sexual act you share with roosters, gerbils, and hippopotami, you'll never become a man."

The main value of a conference, I have always believed, is not so much what takes place while it is in session, but after it is over. At any rate, if there was no time to deliver a spoken answer, there was still time for a written one.

The sad truth of our secular culture is that it offers very little to help a young man complete the transition to manhood. One reason for this is the absence of men who are strong role models. Divorce, feminism, unisex, and mass media that specialize in sex and violence have all conspired to obliterate any clear and compelling notion of what it means to be a mature and responsible man. There is the sexual act, surely, but is there anything else?

To answer the young man's question adequately almost requires an entire course in the philosophy of culture. Saint Thomas Aquinas was well ahead of his time in understanding the impact culture can have on appetite when he wrote: "There is not much sinning because of natural desires. . . But the stimuli of desire which man's cunning has devised are something else, and for the sake of these sins one sins very much." But it might be useful to make one important point that is mounted on a simple distinction.

We can distinguish instinct from institution. Instinct is an impulse, an urge that may express itself without any relation to reason. Institution refers to a broad structure or way of life that is eminently reasonable without necessarily excluding instinct or emotion. The former is small and specific; the latter is large and latitudinous. One is solitary, the other is communal; one is isolated in time, the other draws from the past and bears upon the future. Marriage is an institution, sex is an instinct. The magnitude of the first stands to the second as a palace to a toolshed, and in comprehension, they compare as culture does to a single, bare idea.

Now a young man who aspires to marriage must build a life that includes but goes beyond instinct, so that it becomes large enough to be part of an institution. Just as a Johnny-one-note will never sing grand opera, and a person with only one idea will never become a philosopher, the sex instinct alone cannot provide the wherewithal to establish and sustain a good marriage.

The solution is obvious. A young man must expand and diversify his repertoire so that he becomes the kind of mature man who can handle the responsibilities of husbandhood and fatherhood. Gratifying the sex instinct does not fix a leaky roof, nurse an ailing wife, comfort a frightened child, settle an in-law dispute, or keep the bill collector from the door.

By foregoing sex before marriage, one is almost forced to focus on everything else one must do to learn how to live on the broader plane of existence that marriage demands. In short, if you can't have sex, maybe you can learn how to live. Sex would be a strange instinct, indeed, if its purpose were to supplant character, communication, common sense, community, and co-operation. But sex was never meant to be an enemy of life. It was meant to be a flower set prominently in the midst of a splendid array of flowers. Sex was meant to flower in a garden, not a desert.

The wise young man doesn't ask, "What is there to do if I can't have sex?" He asks, "How can I do all the marvelous things I need to do in so short a period of time?" The nature of sex demands that it be part of a garden, a "culture of life," so to speak. As an instinct and nothing more, it is like living in a toolshed, cramped, suffocating, and terribly lonely.

A young man begins to grow up the moment he senses the fusion of sex with love. At that moment he begins his long, arduous journey to maturity. If sex is an instinct, love is a vision. We should want to marry instinct with vision so that sex has a future. Sex alone is hardly liberation, and even less, a full life. Sex is a beginning, not a finality. But its beginning, in the form of a bare instinct, must be directed through reason and love so that when it is expressed, it fulfills all the meaning it implies.