Like, in the 20th century the mainline Protestant churches tried to deal with the romantic drift of “spouse as soulmate” from “spouse as partner in household as institution” by introducing mandatory classes in their colleges to teach the students how to fuck each other better.

Oh and you know what I just remembered? Marriage manuals.

Which I think even still existed in the 1980s as a degenerate genre of erotica, but early in the 20th century, that was a serious earnest concern of mainstream bourgeois WASP culture in say the 1920s-30s, that young people get on birth control and be good at sex.

There was a concern that marriage was under threat from Romantic ideals, and people were neglecting spouses in favor of lovers, and that this had to do with Christians being sexually repressed and unpracticed and being totally incompetent at getting each other off

(especially with America’s rural homestead culture leaving people so isolated without partners to practice on. Except relatives and barnyard animals, which is absolutely a thing in isolated rural cultures!)

Like in the immediate postwar when the whole “going steady” teenage culture came up, journals of upper-middlebrow tradition were seriously fretting that teenagers were getting too sexually exclusive too soon, and that this boded poorly for the formation of their mature character. And when you think of the divorce wave of the 60s-70s, well…?

(really, a lot of postwar teenage culture was about how the car changed rural life by giving kids the range and mobility to find each other to fuck)

Mind you this was going on while the churches were still in their great missionary boom. In fact, it was kind of related. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, 1928. A lot of period linguistics, anthropology, archaeology was handmaiden to Protestant missionary evangelism, and the churches invested heavily in them. (The rest was a handmaiden to European nationalisms.)

And half a century before Club Med, before the hippie ‘60s, the mainline Protestant churches sent the cream of their young elite off to spend a few years living with tropical islanders and other brown people and one of the bigger things they brought back was “Oh yeah, they’re a lot less uptight about sex, premarital, extramarital, teenage casual, it’s all good. We should try that.”

American culture works by weird paths