CONNECTING

Resent research now confirms that spirituality has a greater effect on the sex lives of young adults — especially women — than religion, impulsivity, or alcohol. People have been well aware of the role that religious and spiritual matters play in everyday life for a very long time, however the unique qualities of spiritually— apart from religiousness — are not usually considered. Of the three qualities in the Spiritual Transcendence Scale; connectedness, universality, and prayer fulfillment, it is connectedness that plays the largest role in spiritual sexuality and leads to more sex with more partners, often without the use of condoms. Believing one is intimately tied to other human beings and that interconnectedness and harmony are indispensable may lead one to believe sexual intimacy possesses a divine or transcendent quality in itself.

In fact, ascribing sacred qualities to sex has been positively associated with positive affective reactions to sex, frequency of sex, and number of sexual partners among university students. Recently in a study, university students were asked about their alcohol use, impulsivity, religiousness, spirituality, and sexual practices. The statements on spirituality, which were ranked by level of agreement, included “In the quiet of my prayers and/or meditations, I find a sense of wholeness,” and “Although individual people may be difficult, I feel an emotional bond with all of humanity. ”The study found that spiritual men weren’t sexually affected — in fact, their frequency of sex decreased.

The researchers figure men might not view spirituality as sexual because they biologically don’t think of sex as a gateway to emotional intimacy. For women, however, spirituality was the strongest predictor for the number of sexual partners, the frequency of sex, and the tendency to have sex without a condom.

Is it possible female young adults yearn for greater connectedness with other humans? Is it really spirituality that makes women more sexual, or does spirituality just imply an open-mindedness that manifests itself through sex?

Research like this suggests that spirituality provides predictive utility over and above personality traits such as conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness. So while it may be the case that spirituality is correlated with other variables that show similar relationships with human sexuality and sexual practices (such as openness to experiences), the relationship observed, in these researcher’s opinions, cannot simply be explained away by other variables.