The longing to jump the life to come: a reprint on Shakespeare, contraception, and risk-taking

From October 2008. See also this follow-up.

In the past month, three of the students I mentor (two women, one man) have come to me reporting pregnancy scares. They are all between 18-21, and each is in a committed relationship, though not with one another. In the case of the lad and one of the gals, the tests came back negative; in the case of the second young woman, she’s planning on taking a pregnancy test later today. (In case you’re wondering, yes, I do have a solid number of students of both sexes whom I mentor — and some of those students choose to seek me out for advice about their private as well as their intellectual lives. In cases where professional counseling is needed, my motto is “affirm and refer”, but in most instances, what these students need is a safe and reliable ear. Given that I teach so many courses on gender and sexuality, it makes sense that some students would seek me out for direction and counsel. I see it as part of my job, remembering that in my college days, I had a few professors from whom I sought personal as well as professional advice.)

I’m familiar with pregnancy scares. Heck, I’m familiar with unintended pregnancies, both in my own life as an adolescent and in my work as a teacher and youth leader. I have helped arrange (and in a couple of instances, helped pay for) abortions, and helped facilitate one adoption. I have been to two weddings of former students who got married as a result of a pregnancy. I’m honored to be trusted by as many young people as I am, and I hope to continue to be worthy of that trust.

But I’ve been thinking more about why so many young people I know choose not to use contraception. The gal who came to see me yesterday had been on the Nuvaring, but her insurance coverage lapsed, and she couldn’t get the scrip refilled. She and her beau had condoms available, but chose not to use them. “I don’t know why we’re so stupid”, she said to me yesterday. The young man I work with who came to me last week, worried his girlfriend might be pregnant, also reported that “condoms were available” at the key moment, but “we went ahead without them anyway.” I wasn’t shocked. When I got my high school girlfriend pregnant, we had condoms nearby as well. I didn’t like wearing them, and my girlfriend said she hated the way they felt. So we used them “some of the time”. And predictably, a pregnancy resulted.

The $64,000 question is: “Why?” Why do bright, educated young people who are very clear about how exactly babies are made choose to have unprotected heterosexual intercourse so very often? Why, on many occasions, do they find such flimsy excuses for not using contraception, even when contraceptive devices are easily available? In some cases, of course, lack of affordability is an issue — condoms aren’t as cheap as some folks think, and other forms of prescription contraception have grown much more expensive in recent years. In other cases, one partner (almost always the male) will nag the other about how “uncomfortable” condoms are. But in plenty of cases, these young people have access to reliable methods of birth control, and choose not to use them. Ignorance is not an all-encompassing explanation, and neither is expense. Something else is at play.

The very same month I got my girlfriend pregnant, my high school English class was assigned Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I remember that my girlfriend and I had that fateful unprotected intercourse on a Sunday afternoon; earlier in the day, I had finished a paper on the play. Like most students, I memorized a few lines (and there are many wonderful lines in this tragedy.) But while some of my classmates fell in love with the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy, the line that grabbed me in 1985 and still grabs me:

But here, on this bank and shoal of time. we’d jumped the life to come.

Even though the verb reads in the past tense, it’s uttered by Macbeth before he has murdered his lord. These are the words of a man thinking through the consequences of what has not yet been done, and realizing he’s risking everything (in this case, his soul.) And I remember, on that afternoon in the spring of 1985, not long before I would turn 18, that that line came into my head as my girlfriend and I made love without any protection. We hadn’t seen each other in a week, she and I — she went to a different high school, and had been away on a retreat. Five months into our relationship, we’d been quarreling a lot in recent weeks. We tumbled into bed that afternoon filled with that potent cocktail of horniness and romantic anxiety, longing as much for reassurance as for orgasm. We had had sex without contraception once or twice before, but this time felt different.

I’m not normally given to premonitions, but I knew intuitively that this was a particularly “unsafe” time to be having sex without a condom. And I remember thinking that I simply didn’t care. The lines from Macbeth flashed through my mind, and I remember changing the verb to the present tense: “on this bank and shoal of time, we jump the life to come.” It seemed desperately romantic (remember, I was 17). As awful and as risky as what Macbeth and his wife were doing, they were doing it together, as a couple, bonding themselves together in their mutual sin. And as my girlfriend and I wrapped ourselves around each other, unable to get enough of one another, I remember thinking “I’m willing to risk everything for this — and the life I’m willing to jump is my own, my future.” Like so many young people in this same situation, I was briefly intoxicated with thoughts of a life together with a baby. My gal and I would always be together, would be unable to part, if we made a child together, or so I believed. And driven by these romantic visions, driven by anxiety, and driven by a longing for fusion with this, my first real love, I came inside my girlfriend.

I remember that afterwards, as we lay together, my girlfriend said to me “We shouldn’t have done that, but I’m glad we did.” I nodded solemnly, feeling the anxiety in me grow by the second. “I feel so close to you, nothing between us”, she said, and held me tighter. I held her back, noting that though my panic was rising, so too was an enormous sense of calm — as long as she and I were together like this, we could take on the whole world. We could stand on that bank and shoal of time and jump — over everything. We were a team, indivisible and fused for ever. It was a happy feeling. Less than two months later, she had the abortion while I sat grimly in the waiting room of a doctor’s office.

In my experience as a mentor and youth leader, a great many young people have unprotected sex for the exact same reason my gal and I did so many years ago. They may or may not quote Shakespeare to themselves as they approach climax, but their reasoning (or lack thereof) is frequently the same. Unprotected sex seems to happen more often in committed relationships than in casual hookups, at least based on the anecdotes I hear from the young men and women with whom I work. That seems counter-intuitive at first. But we often forget that for some young people, the use of contraception not only symbolizes caution, it can come to symbolize a lack of complete and utter trust. Condoms, still the least expensive and most reliable form of over-the-counter contraception, are both literal and metaphorical barriers.

For the young and romantically inclined, floating along on anxiety and horniness and oxcytocin, the condom is a decidedly unromantic reminder of reality, of obligations, of future plans. And so, otherwise bright young people say to each other (or perhaps only to themselves), “If we really love each other, we’ll be okay no matter what.” Part of them may even long for a child, a new creature whose very flesh is made up of the mixed DNA of the self and the beloved other. Faced with all of that emotionally charged imagery, filled with sexual arousal and a longing for still-greater intimacy, it’s all too easy for otherwise sensible, well-informed young folks to “jump” — if not the life to come, at least a whole set of plans and possibilities.

My conservative friends suggest that this constitutes an excellent argument for avoiding pre-marital sex altogether, and avoiding artificial contraception after marriage too. My friend Bethany Torode wrote a book several years ago with her husband Sam: Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception. It was a very romantic book by a young married pair. The two have since repudiated some of their anti-contraception stances, it should be noted, but the appeal of the title, “open embrace”, goes a long way towards explaining what young folks find so damned appealing about sex without protection.

The answer, however, is not to teach abstinence until marriage and Natural Family Planning afterwards. The last thing we need is more insistence that all sexuality is inherently reproductive. But what we do need to do is do a better job of having open dialogue with young people about sex. Not just when to do it, not just how to do it safely, but how to understand what sex means for them. Cheap and widely available contraception is a must, to be sure. But so too is honest discussion about the romantic myths we attach to sex, particularly to intercourse: myths about fusion, myths about commitment, myths about what it means to have sex without barriers. The young are frequently prone to sentimental and hormonal impulsiveness, and condoms alone are insufficient prophylaxes against that desire to “jump” with a lover over all the petty restrictions imposed by common sense.

The sex education we need is about more than “protection.” It’s about more than providing access to abortion as a last resort, thought that remains an important component of justice-centered sex ed. Proper education will center on what sex means and what it doesn’t. And we can start by gently, firmly, and lovingly tearing down the myth that unprotected heterosexual intercourse represents the most intimate and magical expression of trust and love. Until we deconstruct that lie, we only tempt the unprepared to jump too quickly the lives they have to come.