Dating Advice to Young Women: Your Boyfriend Is Saving Access to His Bank Account for His Wife; Save Access to Your Body for Your Husband

Dear Young Women of God,

You’ve heard it said that as a liberated woman, you have every right to make access to your body available for a man outside the protection of his public commitment to you in marriage.

You do have that right. But let me give you a research-based reason to reconsider the wisdom of such generosity. It’s a stat I mention a lot from David Buss’s Evolution of Desire: Two-thirds of all men marry for sensual and sexual security; two-thirds of all women marry for status and financial security.

Everyone who marries, then, marries for the same thing: a kind of security.

Most men marry so that they can mitigate the risks inherent in human sexuality. What’s the greatest sexual risk? Infidelity. Marriage obligates you to keep everyone else out of your body for the duration of the contract.

Under what circumstances can your boyfriend best assess your willingness and ability to keep men to whom you are attracted out of your body? His own premarital–which is to say uncommitted-– overtures.

Most men marry so they can feel safe in a relationship with a faithful wife. Giving an uncommitted man access to your body off contract does not communicate love to your boyfriend: it scares him with first-hand evidence that your sexuality is not contract-bound.

An equal and opposite analogy I hope will make the problem clear.

Most women marry for security related to status and money. Women want to mitigate the risks inherent in human economies. What’s her greatest risk? Incapacitation through pregnancy, childbirth, and potentially early childcare. Marriage helps stabilize economic uncertainties.

Imagine if the sexual revolution that liberated women’s bodies to plunder by the uncommitted contained the correlating fiscal revolution that liberated men’s bank accounts to plunder by the uncommitted.

Considering that men and women marry for different types of security, this would be “equality” of vulnerability for potential mates.  

Your right to give away your body before marriage is equal in vulnerability to your boyfriend’s right to make you a joint-owner on his bank account before he makes a public commitment to you in marriage.

But your boyfriend isn’t doing that. He isn’t even tempted to do it. It hasn’t crossed his mind or his lips to offer that to you, and if you slide up next to him on some starry night and ask him to sign you onto his account–?

That boy will probably jump away from you like you dropped hot coffee on him.

Do you know why he will recoil at that idea of sharing his whole life savings with you before he marries you, while you are off contract?

It’s because he knows you are not his wife. He is not risking his current assets on a fantasy future world of “maybe one day we’ll be married.” Nothing could be more clear to him than his own level of commitment to you.

He is saving access to his bank account for his wife–after he puts her on contract. Men commit by the free decisions they make in public in front of witnesses. He is not confused about your current status or future significance to his life: either he has signed papers with you in front of witnesses, or he has not. If your name is not on his paperwork, you have no commitment, no status, and no significance.

Are you sure you want to give a man access to your body–access that will change your organs and hijack your DNA and influence your brain–when all you know for sure is that your off-contract status means you are insignificant to his current and future plans?

He may love you. He may like you. He may be attracted to you. None of that matters to men. Thank G-d for that: it means he will stay married to you even when he doesn’t feel love for you, like you, or feel attracted to you. His commitment to you, like God’s commitment to us, does not depend on how he feels. God made men with the ability to compartmentalize and make decisions with radical freedom. Their emotions give them information they weigh like all other information. His feelings for you, no matter how pleasant or unpleasant for him to experience, have no effect on the reality of your significance or insignificance to his life.

What men look like when they commit to you.

We Bond Involuntarily; They Commit Voluntarily

As women, our bodies bond by a circulating cocktail of feelings and experiences and hormones that glue us exclusively to a man. Men aren’t like us.

Men’s bodies and hormones are made to protect them from bonding by anything but free commitments they decide to make. Men fall in love by decision. I’ve said it before: men are four-dimensional pictures of the unmerited grace of God. They are not like us.

You will know you are significant to a man when he obligates himself to you in public. I’m repeating that for emphasis because as women, our bodies commit in private, so our experience is different, and if we don’t know men aren’t like us, we can get very confused, and we will get hurt.

In an effort to make this point memorable, let me have a little fun in the counter-factual world of a sexual revolution that makes men vulnerable financially like women were made vulnerable physically:

Dear Young Ladies, imagine the man who, after the first date or the third, carried away by his love, pulls out of his pants the Joint Owner form for his bank account. “I know we hardly know each other,” he says. “But I already love you so much, and I want to express that love. Words are not enough.” Cue Extreme’s “More Than Words,” lyric link.

He hands you the form and the pen, pressing you. “Here. Sign it. I trust you, and I want to prove it.”

Ladies, imagine your own shock and confusion at that offer. Rational men don’t do that, so you would be right to be concerned for his mental health. No amount of cultural cajoling could get a healthy man to devalue his life savings that way. He will remain unmoved no matter what his friends say:

“What, are you some kind of financial prude?

“You’re completely inexperienced in what it feels like to have a woman in your bank account?

“You mean you’d marry a woman without knowing how she spends your money first? Are you nuts?

“I gotta try my women out, give them joint ownership, see if they take five dollars or clean out the account and run. I won’t date a woman past three dates if she won’t go on my account.

“How could you think of marrying a woman without knowing what her spending feels like, whether or not you like it?

“You’re X years old, and you’re a financial virgin?

“Oh, I see: I bet you think theft is sin because it’s in the Bible. Yep. Here we go: ‘G-d says it; you believe it; that settles it.’ Why don’t you have an independent thought? Didn’t that G-d of yours give you a brain?

“What is this, the 1800s? Ancient, backwards view that women shouldn’t be allowed to touch your private accounts before marriage? *gasp* Did you get here in a horse and buggy?

“Free love, man! Liberate the m.o.n.e.y!

“You need help: You, sir, are financially repressed!

“What’s wrong with you? Think your bank account is ‘sacred’? Give me a break.

“Oh, my, do not tell me you are saving your bank account for your wife!

“Check it out! This guy is saving his bank account for marriage!”

Mock away as much as they want, no man would fall for such ridiculous, dangerous lies.

He’s not whipping out the joint-owner paperwork for his bank account after the first date or the third date, the first month or the third or fifth or tenth. He’s not handing over the paperwork because you bought him a meal; his account access is not for sale. Your name on his account is not a precondition of his continuing to date you, nor do you expect him to sign you on to them as his girlfriend or his late-night Tinder hookup.

He’s not putting you on his accounts at all until he’s legally entered a marriage, and sometimes he won’t even do it then.

He’s not stupid enough to risk everything he has on a woman who is not already his wife.

If a man did offer you his bank account on the first date, that offer alone would get him crossed off the Potential Husband list: You can’t marry someone that reckless and untrustworthy if you’re in the 2/3 of all women who marry for status and financial security. It doesn’t matter how much money he has or doesn’t have. He’s not making safe decisions about his money. The generous offer to add you to his account takes him out of the running. He is not of sound mind when it comes to his finances. You will not risk hitching your life to that man. It’s too dangerous for you.

Likewise, when you give away access to your body as if it doesn’t matter, as if it doesn’t put you at significant life-long risk, as if you don’t need a legal contract to protect you, you are proving to the 2/3 of all men who marry for sensual and sexual security that you are not making safe decisions about your sexuality. It doesn’t matter how good or bad you are in bed. Your generous offer to sleep with him off contract takes you out of the running. You are not of sound mind when it comes to protecting your bodily integrity and health. He cannot trust a woman who lets him into her body off contract to keep anyone out of her body when she’s on contract. He will not risk hitching his life to that woman. It’s too dangerous for him.

Both men and women marry for security. What makes them most vulnerable to uncontrolled losses is different for men and women.

This is the real reason to save yourself for marriage, Dear Young Women of God: giving a man your body off contract over-commits you to a man who has not committed to you *at all.* Men commit by where they put their signatures, not where they put their… generative organs. Your body is designed to bond to the one you allow inside of it. His body is designed to protect him from bonding to anyone he has not financially and legally tied to himself in a radically free, rational, public decision.

If he promised you something in private, Dear Women of God, he’s promised you nothing at all. Men commit in public obligations. 

TLDR: Time for us to stop falling for dangerous lies that romanticize premarital sex, Ladies. Our bodies are not designed like men’s bodies. Our vulnerabilities are not the same as men’s vulnerabilities. Men never romanticized premarital joint ownership of their bank accounts. He is not confused about your status and standing with him or your significance regarding his future: if you’re not on his paperwork, he is not committed to you: you do not matter to him. This point is obvious to them; we commit with our bodies, so it is not obvious to us that their experience is not like ours.

Men are not like us.

Your boyfriend is saving access to his bank account for his wife; save access to your body for your husband.

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What significance looks like to a man.

Post soundtrack: Ogden’s “Laid Down Lover”, which captures the bridegroom’s choice to love his bride because of his own free decision (grace, we call this), and the bride’s surrender to him in the safety that free choice creates for her.  

*A note for the Gentlemen who may have read this: “Not like us” is not an insult; you may recognize it as another way to translate what the angels cry to one another about Hashem (God): “Holy!” They repeat it, too, in reverential fear. I am grateful for the way you represent our Father, the King of the Universe.

Unsplash photo credits: Frank Vessia, Adeolu Eletu, Brianna Turner