The Moral Significance of Aftercare after Sex

Aftercare after sex is more than emotional intimacy; it can carry serious moral weight in marriage. This article explains how tenderness after the marital act helps safeguard spouses from treating one another as mere sources of pleasure, a disposition that can risk grave sin.

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Our Apostolate has spoken many times about the importance of providing loving and tender aftercare following the marital act from the standpoint of emotional intimacy, but we would be remiss if we did not also stress the profound moral significance this has as well. 

Now, of course, everyone can understand that during the marriage act itself, sexual passion can move spouses so strongly that affective sentiments about how much they love each other may indeed end up relegated to the back of their minds, and that is okay!  But once sexual relations are over and once both spouses have reached climax, there is, at least for the man, a pretty immediate return to a normal state of mind which is going to reveal to himself and to his spouse the quality of his love and affection when it is not under the influence of active sexual passion. It is precisely this moment of peak emotional vulnerability which will determine whether or not he is enjoying his wife as his wife or whether he is merely using his wife to satiate an appetite. He can either choose to follow up the sexual act with emotional tenderness and affection which can in its own way be its own renewal of the marital dimension of the conjugal act, or he can leave her feeling like she had been used for a one-night stand. 

The moral seriousness of this should not be understated. While it is only a venial sin for spouses to engage in sexual relations for pleasure alone, this still presupposes an underlying care and affection for the other spouse as a human person. If this underlying care and affection is lacking, spouses do indeed run the risk of falling into grave sin. St. Thomas Aquinas puts it this way: 

“If pleasure were sought outside the dignity of marriage, such that, for example, someone did not turn to his wife because she was his wife, but only because she was a woman, prepared to do the same with her as if she were not his wife, that is a mortal sin.” (Commentary on the Sentences, iv, d. 31, art. iii)”

Now I am not necessarily saying that each and every instance of neglecting aftercare reveals this exact disposition, but it is without a doubt a stepping stone toward habitualizing an approach to sexual relations that in due time will allow for this disposition to flourish. And when it does, you run the risk of not only losing emotional intimacy with your spouse, but your soul as well.