Sidney McGill - HEALTHY SEX 101 Should your springs overflow in the streets, your streams of water in the public squares? Let them be yours alone, never to be shared with strangers. May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. Prov.5:16, 17.
IN THE Hebrew Scriptures adultery was a capital offense in which the adulterer and adulteress were made a public disgrace, and the prescribed punishment was death by stoning. In postmodern Jamaica adultery is a crime but the severest penalty is only the dissolution of the marriage by divorce. "The adulterer watches for dusk; he thinks, 'No eye will see me,' and he keeps his face concealed." (Job 24: 15) But with electric lights, cell phones, inadvertent emails, private detectives, satellite dishes, nothing is kept in the dark for long. It is a burden that the faithful partner and other concerned family members must endure or do something about. Adultery and its effects therefore are no longer perceived as a scourge on the society but only a personal moral dilemma.
MARRIAGE IS MORE THAN LOVE
When John came for counselling he thought that his marriage was dead because he felt he was no longer in love with his wife but his ongoing sexual experience with a long time girlfriend was still intensely satisfying. I told him that his intensely gratifying sexual experience would continue as long as the girlfriend remained a mistress. To make her into a wife would change the interpersonal dynamic. He had to be shown the many personal benefits in going through the long haul of marriage to be overhauled. If John could change his ways and become the least anxious presence in the marriage then his wife too would change for the better over time. But this can only happen when he adheres to "forsaking all others..." with the security of "until death do us part." A marriage based on love alone is doomed to fail. Sentimental agreements made on the wedding day change as partners emotionally grow at different rates or interpret hardship differently. If families are the building blocks of a vision-based society then adulterous acts are not only a betrayal of one's marriage vows but consequently a destruction of one's own blocks thereby weakening other blocks in closest proximity.
HIV/AIDS, A CONTAMINANT
OF LOVE
Springs that overflow in the streets or meander into the public squares become contaminated. HIV/AIDS is one such contaminant. The pollutant raises difficult and complex ethical questions for our society but up to this point in time the focus continues to be wrongly fixed on the fatality of the disease rather than on the more serious socio-cultural and moral implications. The economic loss of Jamaica's most precious natural resources, its people, will continue unabated as the virus invades persons and destroys families. Jamaican families are under grave attack. Until we wake up and begin to understand that adultery and the practice of sex outside of committed relationships is not merely a question of what should sex partners do (use a condom) but what should they be (a question of character). Character is who you are when no one is looking. It is pliable and even transformable. Good character is a necessary ingredient for nation building and a prerequisite to inherit the Kingdom of God. "Neither the sexually immoral --nor adulterers -- will inherit the Kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." 1 Cor.6:9b-11. [To be continued]
Dr. Sidney McGill is a marriage and family therapist and executive director of the Family Counselling Centre of Jamaica, St. Ann; email: yourhealth@gleanerjm.com.
