Pence Won’t Have Dinner With A Woman Who Isn’t His Wife

[Anna Komnene]

I don't really care what the Pences do in their personal life, but in my opinion, this kind of thinking all goes back to childhood.  Enforcing and encouraging gender norms at a young age, leads to a kind of situation where boys and girls don't interact with each other and don't understand each other.  The other sex ends up becoming this mythical creature that is feared and loathed for being icky until one day the siren call is flaring like mad with certain people in the opposite sex now cloaked in some sort of shining light from up on high (making things all the more confusing if all your friends are seeing that light and you aren't).  Obviously there are biological things at play here, so people would be feeling a lot of these desires and urges anyway, but the social aspects contribute to people deciding that people of the opposite sex are only meant to be hunted for marital (and sexual) bliss, instead of being people that could be lifelong friends.

So Pence's life is his business, but I'd also note that by saying this in that interview, he is making a normative statement for mass public consumption, and he's also made his views on gender norms clear on a variety of occasions in the past.