I came of age in the eighties, and the rules of that time now read like dispatches from another planet.
It helps to know that my home terrain was Scandinavia, at a time when the region was famous, or infamous, for its wantonness. We lived in a bubble, and I did not know it until I left. Every culture has its own bubble, and what follows is really a study of bubbles: the one I grew up in, the ones my son’s generation lives in, and the ones people build when they try to escape.
Sometimes we slept together to find out whether we were compatible enough to start dating. The order of operations ran backwards, and nobody thought it strange. One-night stands were common, and women started them as often as men did. Walking up to a stranger in a bar and saying plainly what you wanted was part of how the night worked, and the answers ranged from yes to a laugh to a drink in the face, and either way nobody went home to call a lawyer or launch a social media Armageddon.
In my circle of friends, couples who lived together sometimes slept with other people, and the whole group knew about it without ever saying so out loud. A kind of silent collective knowledge. Nobody filed a report. Nobody wrote a confessional essay. No one cried “me too”. The next morning we had breakfast together.
Heartbreaks were common, sure, but they were part of the roadwork.
The fact that we carried no mobile phones and had no social media accounts doesn’t fully explain the gulf between the two generations, although their absence was a blessing.
Look at the same terrain forty years later.
My son is twenty-four. He is handsome, intelligent, funny, built like a Greek statue, and he has more or less given up on dating.
He tells me he would rather get some work done than spend 150 euros on dinner with a self-entitled woman. I cannot say I blame him, and he is far from alone. In the 2024 General Social Survey in the United States, 27 percent of men between eighteen and twenty-nine said they had not had sex once in the past year. More than half of them were single.
I’m not worried about my son. I only wish he’d been around to teach me a thing or two when I was his age. He knows what he’s doing and will settle down with his shining damsel when he feels the time is right. And he has a point about the downside of dating. When you’re on a mission in life, dating is bound to be a distraction, and solitude is the rocket fuel of innovation.
What does make me wonder is how fast the shift happened on a societal level. Here are two generations, forty years apart. One slept around without a second thought. The other barely sleeps with anybody.
And yet both worlds agree on one thing. Commitment is the prize. The eighties crowd said it was the place you would end up once the party was over. My son’s generation says it is the only thing worth the trouble, and that it is almost impossible to find.
The sacred word
Commitment is the sacred word of our culture. Marriage is its paper-signed version, the contract with a stamp on it. To commit is to bind yourself to one person, one future, one story, and to refuse every other.
Its opposite, in the moral vocabulary we inherited, is promiscuity.
In the eighties promiscuity was flippant, mildly embarrassing at worst. Today it has slid from bad manners to bad character, and in the public mind it lives next door to crime. Every few months the media lights up another famous man, and the word promiscuous quietly turns into the word predator.
Some of those men are true predators. I’ve met a bunch, and what separates them from the merely promiscuous is conscience. The predator has none. He runs like a machine and sees no person in front of him, only an exploit. Women can be predators too, a fact we should realize far more often.
Then there are the apex predators, the Epsteins and the Weinsteins, who turned the hunt into an industry with a payroll. Below them, I suspect, sit more sadistic sons of bitches dressing it up as ritual than any of us cares to imagine. The trouble for the committed man who falls off the wagon for one promiscuous swing is that the public files him in the same drawer. I know men who no longer dare walk across a bar to say hello, for fear of being judged by their darkest possible self.
Which brings me to Russell Brand. The allegations came from six women, some of them former groupies, about events two or three decades old. He has been found guilty and is about to hit the slammer for “significant” time. I can’t pretend to know anything about the man, but the media storm around his case fascinates me, and so does the way it splits us down the middle, red against blue.
Behold the hypocrisy, the arithmetic of attention. Whatever Brand did gets about a million times more airtime than the girls, most of them children, who were groomed and raped across English towns for decades by gangs drawn largely from one community. A number that could exceed 250,000 girls, according to the estimate repeated in Rupert Lowe’s 2026 rape gang inquiry report.
Russell’s case reminds me of the rape allegations against Julian Assange, whom I met twice for interviews before his arrest. His words still stick with me: “Courage is addictive.” The moment those allegations surfaced, I was convinced he was being framed—his promiscuity weaponized against him, while the rape allegations themselves ultimately failed to hold up in court.
The point is this. Promiscuity is now a weapon of mass judgement.
Jung said that everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. So maybe we should all put on a Jungian lens and ask what is such a big deal about Russell that we keep posting about him until midnight — while ignoring the Pakistani gangs of mass rape.
I always found Russell irritating, although I appreciated his plunge into truth-telling. With my Jungian glasses on, I recognise traces of him in myself, parts I’ve tried to bury that still surface under the influence. The glib talker. The smooth know-it-all who didn’t mind taking people for a spin.
I only mention Brand’s case because the sheer scale of the media blitz got me thinking about a deeper topic.
What happened to the concepts of promiscuity and commitment in four short decades?
The highest goal, failing
If commitment is the highest goal, the scoreboard does not look good.
Roughly four marriages in ten end in divorce in the United States, a tad less in Europe. Those are only the ones that end on paper. Nobody counts the marriages that end quietly at the dinner table and carry on for twenty more years out of habit, money, or fear.
The dynamics behind commitment are at least as flunky as the dynamics behind promiscuity.
In the classical fairytale, we are promised that one plus one makes two, and that two is paradise. In practice most of us arrive at commitment as fractions, half a person carrying the unfinished business of the family that raised us. We look for a partner to complete us, and we find one who carries a matching half. The halves do not add. They multiply. Point five times point five is a quarter, and a quarter, lived in daily, is hell.
Therapists call the pattern codependency, two people propping each other up so neither has to stand alone. The family therapists Barry and Janae Weinhold once claimed it affects nearly everybody in America. Spend a week listening to couples in a restaurant and you might not argue with it either.
If you fell in love last year and that last paragraph makes you angry, I understand. Read it again in a few years. The psychologist Dorothy Tennov, who coined the word limerence for the obsessive early stage of romantic love, found it usually lasts somewhere between a year and a half and three years. The chemistry is real. So is its expiry date.
So what went sideways with our idea of commitment? And could the same thing explain why we judge promiscuity so harshly?
The tribe
How did people live before the contract?
The most cited answer comes from the Amazon. In the 1990s the anthropologist Stephen Beckerman lived among the Barí, a forest people on the border of Venezuela and Colombia. The Barí believe a child is built up over months from the semen of every man a woman sleeps with while she is pregnant. Each of those men is a father, and each owes the child fish and meat. Beckerman counted, and a Barí child with a second father was about 16 percent more likely to reach fifteen than a child with only one. Among the Aché of Paraguay, extra fathers seem to protect children from violence, which was the main thing that killed them.
In 2010 Robert Walker, Mark Flinn and Kim Hill surveyed 128 lowland South American societies. Of the 76 with recorded beliefs about conception, 53 held that a child can have several fathers. The same survey found the belief most often where a husband moves in with his wife’s family, rather than the other way round. The women stay among their own mothers and sisters. The men come and go.
That arrangement is matrilineal, organised around the mother’s line, which is different from a society ruled by women. True matriarchies are rare in the record and hotly disputed. Matrilineal societies are common. The Mosuo of southwest China are the most famous living example. Traditionally, Mosuo women do not marry. A lover visits at night and leaves at dawn, and the children are raised by the mother’s household, with her brothers in the role of fathers.
What made sex outside one couple workable in these places? It was woven into survival. A child with three fathers had three providers. A child raised by a household of aunts and uncles did not depend on two tired adults staying in love. Sex was tied to the life of the group rather than to the private happiness of two people, and the group held it.
Practices we would today label as promiscuous were found among forest farmers who also hunted and fished, as well as among some of the nomadic foragers whose way of life defined most of human history. The best-studied hunter-gatherers, such as the Hadza of Tanzania, tend to form partnerships lasting a few years before pairing off again. Even in societies that recognize multiple fathers, as Lynn Saxon pointed out in Sex at Dusk, men still guard their partners, experience jealousy, and sometimes kill children they suspect are not their own.
So nobody discovered a paradise of free love. What the record does show is something more useful. For most of human history children were raised by many hands, and sex was one thread in a thick rope of belonging. The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy calls it cooperative breeding. Nobody in her account raises a child alone, and nobody raises one with only two - in a concrete box surrounded by a maze of asphalt.
Pull the other threads out of the rope, the tribe, the village, the extended family, the daily contact with earth and sky, and leave only the sex and the couple. What do you expect to happen?
The escape artists
Some people try to weave the rope back together by hand. I’ve filmed a few of them over the years for TV projects.
The first were the Raëlians, the UFO religion founded in 1974 by Claude Vorilhon, a French former sports journalist who calls himself Raël. He claimed that aliens called the Elohim, humanity’s creators, met him in a volcano near Clermont-Ferrand and sent him to spread their message and build them an embassy on Earth. On a preproduction trip for a documentary I hung out with members in Spain, Canada and Japan. They were not the drooling believers you might imagine. Many were doctors, engineers, professionals with good degrees. Their community ran on frequent sex with many partners, out in the open. The other item on the agenda was eternal life through cloning. In 2002 their company, Clonaid, announced the first cloned baby, said some of the work had been done in South Korea, and never produced the baby or a shred of proof.
I remember Raël at a lectern explaining how lucky bisexual people were. Everybody else could choose from three and a half billion partners, he said, and they could choose from seven.
It worked, for a while. The members glowed. They looked lighter than anybody at my parents’ dinner table. Then, slowly, I watched the old programme catch up with them. The jealousy came back. The sulking, the possessiveness, the scenes in hotel corridors at three in the morning. The same melodrama as any suburban marriage, only on a delay, as if their childhood conditioning had needed a few extra years to wear through the Kool-Aid.
I’ve also interviewed followers of Osho, the Indian guru who preached free sex as a path to enlightenment. His devotees bought him 93 Rolls-Royces before the movement imploded in Oregon in 1985, wrecked by his right hand, Ma Anand Sheela, whose people had poisoned hundreds of townsfolk with salmonella. Osho said the point of free sex was to get it out of your system and move on, “from sex to superconsciousness”. He believed modern society kept people in check by repressing their sexuality. I’m not sure how many of his followers made it all the way through.
The third group I filmed for a documentary about tantra, along the California coast and up in Sonoma. These were people who had jumped out of the system entirely. They had built a bubble of workshops, retreats and shared houses around a charismatic teacher called Baba Dez, and inside it the bedroom doors were rarely closed. Many of them glowed too, at least at first, with the freshness of people finally allowed to feel their own bodies.
Then the bubble did what bubbles do. Esoteric explanations piled up around every feeling. Rent, children and a sick parent turned into spiritual tests and energetic blockages. Some of them could no longer hold a job or a normal conversation outside the bubble, and the freedom started to look like another cage, with incense. Baba Dez himself stood down in 2019 amid allegations of sexual impropriety, which he has never answered in public, and spent long stretches in New Zealand while the school he founded faced police raids and press exposés on three continents.
Both groups had copied the sex and skipped the rope. They had the free love without the village that made it work, without shared children, shared land, shared survival. And they brought their old wounds along with them. Half a person in a bed with five other halves is still half a person. The fraction travels with you.
The dynamo duo
So is variety the answer or the problem?
My belief, and it is a belief built on years of my own observation rather than a proven fact, is that we are electromagnetic beings first and chemical beings second. Every body runs on electrical charge and throws off a field. I think those fields meet the way ripples meet on a pond, strengthening each other in some places and cancelling each other out in others. (I wrote about this in an earlier piece, Beyond Willpower.)
If that is true, the body needs variety in the fields it encounters, just as a dynamo needs movement to generate current. Two fields locked together for decades, encountering little else, gradually settle into the same narrow pattern—unless, of course, they have a gift for renewing their own patterns, as some extraordinary couples do. But the default is hard to deny. I have watched it happen to couples married for thirty years, who end up wearing the same expression, speaking in the same tired rhythm, and sleeping in separate rooms. They live a metre apart, yet have long since stopped reaching each other.
Variety is a different thing from wantonness, though, and field theory is stricter about it than any priest. If proximity shapes us, then intimate proximity shapes us more profoundly than anything else. Lie close to someone, and their field begins rewriting yours a million times faster than any exchange of bodily fluids ever could. Every person you allow that close leaves a mark you carry home. So the theory offers no licence to sleep with whoever happens to walk by. It calls for variety, authenticity, quality, many fields, and many forms of closeness. Above all, it asks you to choose with great care whose field you allow all the way in.
The field does not need sex to do its work. Two people can sit close, breathe together, hold each other without going any further, and the charge moves just the same. Non-sexual intimacy can generate just as much oomph as sex itself, sometimes even more, because nobody is performing and nobody is keeping score.
And yet in most modern relationships even this is forbidden. Try telling your partner that you spent an evening holding a friend who was grieving, or that you lay on the grass with somebody and breathed together until the sun went down. Watch the face change. A long, tender hour with someone else often stirs up more codependent jealousy than one weak moment in a hotel room ever would. A fling can be filed under lust and forgiven. Closeness cannot, because closeness is the thing each partner secretly believes they own.
And here, I believe, is the real disease. We have turned closeness into property and then rationed it. A body built to meet dozens of fields a day now meets one, if it is lucky, and is told that wanting more is a betrayal. The hunger does not go away because it has been declared off limits. It goes underground.
Much of it goes to pornography. A screen offers the shape of intimacy with none of the field. No warmth, no breath, no charge passing between two bodies, only light on a retina and a jolt of dopamine. It is the junk food of closeness, cheap, endless, and engineered to leave you hungrier than before. A starved body reaches for whatever looks like food, and an industry that profits from the starvation keeps the shelves stocked.
Notice, too, which kind of intimacy many jealous partners tolerate more easily. Often it is the screen behind a locked bathroom door rather than an honest evening with a friend. The screen leaves the property intact. The friend does not.
So the variety a body seems to need is a variety of contact, closeness, touch and presence from many people. The village used to supply it for free. Our arrangement rations it to one person, and then wonders why that one person cannot carry the whole supply.
The demon or the escapee
Back to the question. Is promiscuity a little demon inside us, or a person trying to escape?
Mostly, I think, it is the second. A person running from one bed to the next is often looking for the rope, the village, the many sources of warmth a human body still expects. They find a few hours of it and lose it again by morning. The young man who stays home with his work is running from the same hole in the opposite direction. One floods the gap with strangers. The other seals it shut.
Does that excuse cruelty or lying? No. Does it explain why so many decent people end up doing it? I think it does.
Now for my conspiracy (aka reality) theory. Sex between two mature adults, free of dependency, can be the most energising force a human body has access to. Practised on a non-zero-sum basis where neither person takes from the other and both leave with more than they brought, it charges the whole system. A population that knew how to do that would be very hard to sell anything to. Or to control.
Look at what has been done to our other sources of energy. Food was stripped of its nutrients and sold back to us as convenience. Medicine learned to manage symptoms for life rather than end them. Sunlight was recast as a threat, and we were sold creams to hide from it. Our attention was strip-mined and auctioned off to advertisers by the second. I believe the same asymmetric attack on society shows up most clearly in the most intimate domain of all. Sex has been weaponised by debasing it, cheapened into a commodity on one side and turned into a crime scene on the other, until the strongest current we have is either sold by the minute or feared.
Commitment did not escape either. Romantic love, a fever built to burn for a season, was sold to us as the only foundation a lifelong union could stand on. When the fever broke, as fevers do, we blamed ourselves rather than the design. Then the family itself, the last unit that answered to nobody, was pulled apart from both ends, with both parents sent out to work and the children handed to institutions.
Look at the pattern and ask who profits.
Which leaves the modern bubble with a paradox. Live by its rules and you will most likely fail to become a happy person. Try to escape them and you will most likely fail by judgement, branded the addict, the cheat, the selfish one or the crank. What options are left?
Maybe only one. Take commitment back. Strip it of the stamp, the audience and the approval of society, and make it personal. A commitment to yourself first, to becoming whole, and then to the people you choose, on terms no institution needs to sign. That kind of commitment asks nobody’s permission and fears nobody’s verdict, because nobody else holds the contract.
Before you go
I believe the most powerful way to fix what’s wrong with the world is to start with ourselves.
When something goes wrong with your body, field, mindset, or spirit, the answer often lies in the fundamentals of how you live. Yet what gets sold is another pill, another subscription, another dependency.
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Die warmte verlangen. Ik sluit mij er bij aan, meer het tweede dan de eerste. Al hoewel het niet vluchtig of voor een paar uur hoeft te zijn..
Yes, we need the village back, a whole new set-up, and discover what it means to be human, on a physical, psychological and transpersonal level, see > human-purpose-village.earth