Valentine’s Day 3.0

When Marriage is Deconstructed, All That’s Left is Sex

The further society moves away from belief in, respect for, and submission to Scripture, the more bizarre and less salubrious social mores become. Social structures emerging from Scriptural truth are dis-integrating, and people are bereft of boundaries that hem in the worst manifestations of sin and help create a place conducive to human flourishing.

That is nowhere more apparent than in contemporary society’s view of marriage and its less committed form once called “shacking up.” Now that shame has been shamed into the closet, the term “shacking up” with all its negative connotations has become anathema. Shame is evil now that evil is celebrated. Today, there is nothing to fear but shame itself.

And so now, Archie need not choose between Betty and Veronica. The three can become a throuple, and their story will be sprinkled with delusional happy thoughts about their flourishing children.

In materially developed and morally degraded societies, sex is now wholly separate from procreation, marriage, and sexual complementarity. God’s design for marriage has been rejected piece by piece until marriage is a word devoid of meaning and so has no value to the unbelieving masses.

“Being Sexual Differently”

One of the results of this abandonment of the idea that sex was made for marriage is the rise of the throuple. A recent article out of Sydney, Australia, titled Easy as one, two, three: Are throuples becoming more mainstream?, shows how devolved the sexual lives of those who see themselves as evolved are becoming.

The twelve-year-old chichi hotel and resort chain QT has dedicated Valentine’s Day 2023 to throuples via an “inclusive campaign” promoted by this devilish ad incentivizing sexual profligacy for fun and profit:

Danelle Ayers, director of brand for QT Hotels and Resorts cheerfully writes,

A few years ago you would’ve had to have googled the term ‘throuple’, whereas now it’s fairly well known and we like to be on trend, and part of the cultural zeitgeist.

For the worldly among us, being “on trend” and part of every regnant “cultural zeitgeist” is the be-all and end-all. No need to think deeply about the worth or potential consequences of new trends. Just hop aboard the trend train and clean up the mangled bodies later when no one is looking, and the press isn’t reporting.

Sydney, Australia sex therapist Jacqueline Hellyer waxes positive about “non-monogamy,” formerly called promiscuity, fornication, or adultery:

I think it’s a really nice idea because otherwise people are deceitful and deceit is never a good thing. … It really is just possibilities of loving each other differently, or wanting to be sexual differently.

Minor-attracted persons, zoophiles, and those who experience “genetic sexual attraction” must be full of eager anticipation of a future in which the corporate world embraces the “possibilities of … wanting to be sexual differently.”

Dr. Samuel Shpall, senior lecturer in philosophy at Sydney University, acknowledges a shift in attitudes among his students over the past decade:

Many of them nowadays come into a lecture on non-monogamy with the prior belief that monogamy is unjustifiable, or at least that monogamy is, you know, a set of often coercively imposed structures that aren’t conducive to human wellbeing.

Clear-thinking people understand that the social construction of trends is an ongoing project in all societies. Whatever view of marriage prevails at any moment in history renders the antithesis wrong or worse.

Right now, society is socially constructing and coercively imposing the idea that God’s view of marriage as monogamous and sexually complementary is bigoted, narrow-minded, oppressive, and unnatural.

Throuple-normativity was not created ex nihilo. The stuff that birthed it began decades ago. The sexual revolution severed sex from procreation, sex from marriage, sex from sexual complementarity, and socially constructed an easy-peasy divorce culture which subordinated children’s needs to adult desires. Those trends formed the soil from which throuple-normativity has sprung like a noxious weed.

The Discarded Reality: What Sex Is

Elisabeth Shaw, CEO of Relationships Australia NSW, who “‘definitely has much more conversation with people who are coming in about polyamory,’” makes clear that divorce has wreaked havoc on the hearts and minds of children and left them vulnerable to profoundly disordered ideas about sex:

A lot of young people, in particular, are saying, ‘Well, the proposition that you meet someone and stay with the one person is not the sort of holy grail that we were sold’,” she says, noting that many have come from divorced parents, or have a relative who has divorced.

Sex was made for marriage and marriage has both a nature and a purpose, an ontology and a teleology. It is something.

It is the union of two sexually complementary persons whose union creates a single organic unit. Sex was not made for erotic entertainment. It was not made to fill the void left in humans who were created for union with God but reject that union. A throuple is not and cannot be a marriage. And the sexual antics and erotic compulsions of throuples will never satisfy the longings of human beings created in the likeness and image of God.

In all the happy talk about the niceness of throupling, there is little talk about the needs and rights of children who are born into these perverse households or about children who feel emotionally coerced into concealing their anguish about the non-monogamy of their parents.

Occasionally, polyamorists will openly discuss jealousy but only as a socially constructed, unhealthy, unnatural reaction that they actively work to deconstruct. If only they would work that hard at deconstructing wayward sexual impulses and deceit.