At first glance, this question seems kind of simple right?

The reason why Jedi’s aren’t allowed to love let alone have sex is that if you love someone by definition, you will fear losing them.

And this is no good because…

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering-Yoda

I mean we don’t have to look very far to see this in action. Just look at Anakin Skywalker, the main subject of all the Star Wars films. He was destroyed by his fear. He was supposed to bring balance to the force, but he met a girl, and from there it didn’t quite go the way of a romcom.

We saw other Jedi’s being tempted in such a way and resisting this temptation like my boy Obi Won in the Clone Wars.

The Jedi are meant to be stoic figures that suppress and refrain from engaging their basic urges. Otherwise, they would soon be slaughtering a temple full of younglings. Or, you know, just leaving the Jedi order like a normal person would.

That’s just a thought there Anakin.

I always found this reason to be logical, but I also feel it’s incomplete. So allow me to present my alternative and much more thorough reason as to why the Jedi aren’t allowed to fornicate.

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The first thing we need to understand is that the force is both a religion and a physical entity that can be quantified via the use of midichlorians. I, like most Star Wars faithful, am not a fan of these midichlorians. But they exist and prove my point, so we’re going to talk about them.

Midichlorians for those who don’t know can measure one’s connection to the force, or how strong the force is with someone. They act as a sort of cells within a body that I postulate are genetically transferable, just like a normal gene. So if your parents are tall, you’re likely to be tall. If they’re strong in the force, you’re likely to be strong in the force.

We know this because of the lineage of Skywalker family. It is not a coincidence that the greatest force wielder in history is the father of the greatest Jedi of all time and the grandfather of Kylo Ren. Remember, being a Jedi is supposed to be next to impossible. There are 10,000 Jedi before order 66. Which means out of an entire universe only 10,000 people have the midichlorians high enough to be in the Jedi order which was already being kind of lax with their selection. For reference, late basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain claimed to have had sex with 20,000 women. So I don’t need to start doing hypothesis tests to show that being the son of a force user is going to give you a greater connection to the force.

This can also be further found in evidence when you examine the Sith species. For those with an actual life who don’t need to know this: the Sith were first a species of red looking humans who had a greater than average propensity for being force sensitive. Which means that the ability to be force sensitive is not just randomly distributed across species. But can be localized, kind of like a gene.

If we want to extend this and look at the non-canon extended universe, we need not look further than the Star Killer, Galen Marek. The son of two Jedi Knights, he was so powerful that Vader confused him for a full grown Jedi when he was a child. Again, I know this isn’t cannon because Lucas Arts would have one heck of a time trying to explain away how Galen was able to force control an entire Star Destroyer with the force.

And if we keep going down the rabbit hole that is the EU we’ll notice that the entire Skywalker family are all adept force users leader to an exciting conclusion.

The Jedi aren’t dumb. At the beginning, they would have been able to put two and two together and realize that if two force sensitive people have kids their kid would be ultra powerful. This lead them to a moral quagmire which plagues every Jedi that has ever walked this earth.

This question, is of course, if we should seek more power to do more good.

The Jedi’s could have embraced this way of living in their greater battle against the Sith. Selective breeding would have allowed them to far outmatch their adversaries and bring balance to the force thousands of years before an old man had to be thrown into a pit.

This would not come without repercussions, however.

First of all, this would distort the purpose of the Jedi. The Jedi are not here to become more powerful. Because if they were, they would go to the dark side, where power is attained much quicker and by far less force sensitive people.

In addition to this, this new type of recruitment would not just corrupt the Jedi morally. But would force them to become the evil they pledged to fight against.

For instance, let’s just say that after generations of selective breeding a Jedi as strong as the OG Skywalker arrises. This “Jedi” will have kids, and like their father/mother, they would be strong in the force ad infinitum. This “Jedi” family quickly becomes the most powerful in all the order and slowly turn it into a kingdom.

Let’s take a moment to ponder the implications of this, given our knowledge of monarchies. What ends up happening when one ruling family is in power for multiple generations inbreeding starts to occur. This means that recessive genes are more likely to come to light (for more about genes) which can be slightly problematic. We all know what happened in Game of Thrones when a mad king takes the thrown. But what if that king also so happened to be the strongest Jedi alive? The results would be nothing short of horrifying. In addition to this, a ruling family will do everything in order to maintain their power. This could mean that they would sense force sensitive users and kill them before they come to power.

It is worth noting, that in Star Wars the force is a sentient entity that tries to correct itself. For instance, the reason why Sidious seduces Anakin instead of killing him is because he knew that if he killed Anakin the force would just replace him with another.

Therefore to avoid the bastardization of the light side of the force, the Jedi’s they took a page out of religion. Agree/disagree with this if you want, but many a person has shown that religion is used to control behavior. At best you can think of it as don’t eat pork because at the time pork is dangerous to eat because we don’t have fridges. And at worst to control the poor as Napoleon put it “from keeping the poor from murdering the rich.”

In the Star Wars universe, the Jedi’s took a page out of Nietzsche’s book and made not having romantic interest as an act of goodness. They spread this idea that loving or showing any emotion of any sort is dangerous. Which is why Anakin said (one of the worst lines in movie history) “from my point of view the Jedi are evil.”

(Which If you think about it. They kind of take children whether it is voluntary of involuntary from their parents, indoctrinate in dogmatic practices, give them weird titles and make them dress funny. So in other words a cult).

But in any case, we’ve seen many an example of a Jedi having a romantic interest and it being completely okay. Luke Skywalker comes to mind as well as Kanan Jarrus.

Things will get more interesting when “The Last Jedi” comes out in December because we’ll figure out if Luke had kids.