Being unmarried - a taint of evil?

[HLGStrider]

So would you compare Shire society to Amish society?

Not really. The only similarities are in that they are a society that has set itself apart from the surrounding society and that they are both based in agriculture, but not a whole lot of other parallels.

I would compare the Shire to a small, isolated farming village in a different century. I don't think there is a modern day comparison.

Or perhaps Tolkien was a typical "don't ask, don't tell" Catholic.

To do so would make a lot of assumptions about the man that are not supported by any of his writing or any first hand accounts of conversations with him.

Of course not, Tolkien was not a cheesy Romance novel writer, but even in his books there are tales of love, and not all of them ended well. This proves that even in Middle Earth, sex, love, etc, were around, and not always in idealistic situations.

But in situations that maintained a sense of honor, where there were guidelines as to how to approach the other sex, etc. It was not considered right to marry a woman without her father's approval, for instance. We have no examples of pre-marital encounters, where even accidental incest was enough of a dishonor to merit suicide, where the main cultures were all monogamous, where messing with a woman's affections if you didn't intend to wed her was a no-no. Etc. The details that we know all suggest a more sexual restricted society than the one we are currently in.