So, we all know that marital is the adjective related to all things marriage, which Ambrose Bierce has defined as:

the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.

Likewise, we all know that premarital sex and extra-marital sex both refer to fornication. Both words, also, relate to marriage as the primary, ideal state. Extra-marital affairs are had only by married persons who step out; premarital sex is had only by persons who are not yet married but one day will be, though not necessarily to one another.

But what is had by the non-celibate person who is not married, never intends to marry, and never does marry? Is he or she perpetually caught in an adolescent state of premarital sex? Is there such a thing as amarital sex? What is the appropriate word, beyond fornication, to describe the active sex-life of a non-married person for whom marriage is not the ideal towards which she or he moves (his or her hips)?

Currently, I am using non-marital intercourse, because amarital seems too coined, and not mot jus enough… of course, given that this is seventeenth-century New Spain, the church and state wouldn’t‘ve minced words and, indeed, didn’t—constantly harping about the licentious Spanish vagabonds, come over to the Americas to pervert the naturally chaste Indian, wantonly spread their seed, and leave miscegenated bastards in their wake.

Given the high rate of transience, cohabitation has too permanent a connotation… especially since cohabitation, so long as the male stayed and provided for the family, baptized the young, and attended mass would’ve been perfectly fine. The problem was the roving explorer with romin’ hands and rushin’ fingers, or as my mom says in her bizarre mix of very puritanical language policing yet, at times, bawdy and always condemnatory use of street slang… the problem’s with all those hummingbirds (picaflores—the Spanish word means flower pricker, and the word puns on both the prick and the propensity of hummingbirds to feast on many a flower; flower, of course, being a reference to female anatomy… Though my mother no doubt knows the flower-pudenda connection, I doubt she realizes the connotation of pica… but this is now beside the point.)

Comments