Newsweek’s current cover story, “Sex and the Single Boomer: The New World of Midlife Romance,” offers further evidence that an embrace of deep sexual confusion has become something of a national passion. In the age of no-fault divorce laws, Viagra, and multiple “lifestyle” choices, middle-aged adults are negotiating amidst promiscuity while they seek a romantic passion that their own choices make incredibly difficult to find — and to maintain.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that more Americans are living in single-person households. According to a report in the Associated Press, “the number of Americans living alone has exceeded the number of households comprised of the classic nuclear family: a married couple and their natural children.”
Thomas F. Coleman, executive director of Unmarried America, described as “an association that promotes the political interests of single people,” pointed to changing social norms as the main factor in this demographic development. “Self esteem isn’t based on having children and being married anymore,” he explained.
Here’s the Census Bureau’s press release for “Unmarried and Single Americans Week:” Note the political correctness reflected in this sentence: “The week is now widely observed during the third full week of September (Sept. 18-24 in 2005) as ‘Unmarried and Single Americans Week,’ an acknowledgment that many unmarried Americans do not identify with the word ’single’ because they are parents, have partners or are widowed.”

Danielle Crittenden, author of What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us, has written a must-read article, “The Cost of Delaying Marriage.” The article has recently been republished by Boundless.org. This is an issue I address often, and I appreciate Crittenden’s thoughtful analysis — as well as her perspective as a woman.
Crittenden [married to David Frum, by the way], observes that, as recently as the 1950s, most young women married early. Her analysis:
In this sense, we lead lives that are exactly the inverse of our grandmothers’. If previous generations of women were raised to believe that they could only realize themselves within the roles of wife and mother, now the opposite is thought true: It’s only outside these roles that we are able to realize our full potential and worth as human beings. A 20-year-old bride is considered as pitiable as a 30-year-old spinster used to be. Once a husband and children were thought to be essential to a woman’s identity, the source of purpose in her life; today, they are seen as peripherals, accessories that we attach only after our full identities are up and running.
The article is really important. Her intelligent celebration of marriage is refreshing: What we rarely hear – or perhaps are too fearful to admit – is how liberating marriage can actually be. As nerve-wracking as making the decision can be, it is also an enormous relief once it is made. The moment we say, “I do,” we have answered one of the great crucial questions of our lives: We now know with whom we’ll be spending the rest of our years, who will be the father of our children, who will be our family.

Sex and romance remain big issues in popular culture–and for good reason. In a fallen world, issues of sexuality and romantic love are prime candidates for corruption and confusion. HBO’s Emmy-winning Sex and the City may serve as the most potent symbol of the secular distortion of romance and the postmodern confusion of sexuality that is now taken for granted in many sectors of American society.