I had a childhood teeming with people. Not just a family of three younger brothers and two parents, but also my dad’s twelve siblings and their families, and my mom’s three sisters and brothers and theirs. I have grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and too many to count. The neighborhood I grew up in has multiple families with children my age, some older, most younger.  There were always new babies next door to hold and kiss on the cheek. I had more siblings than I could keep track of to play with, sometimes fight with, but mostly just get dirty with. Whitman writes,

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough, 

To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, 

To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough

And also, 

There is something in staying close to men and women, and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well.

I think of the summertime when we ran from yard to yard while our mothers held the babies and laughed together.  And the winter when we dragged our sleds to the nearest hill and then home to any house in the neighborhood to sit by the fireplace and dry our socks. 

My house in the neighborhood was a curious place. I asked my parents and they told me it was a house church. All I knew was that that meant on Sunday mornings my brothers and I would put aside sibling rivalries and put away our toys. We would convert the dining room into a sanctuary with hymn books on the chairs. The podium my father built went under the window. My father would lead a worship service from there. On Friday night’s my parents and others gathered in that same room for bible studies.

My home was open to all kinds of people. We would sing together, eat together, pray together, and sometimes live together. We once lived communally with another family, shared kitchen and a living room. When they moved next door there was always someone else moving in. Whether a student from Paraguay, a preschool teacher with her crazy dog, a young pharmacist from Chicago or Korean couple. I was always among people I loved, or sometimes people I would rather have nothing to do with had my parents not invited them into our home. Instead of Whitman’s housekeepers, fireman, wrestlers and farmer’s daughters In my house I remember Korean grandmothers, a Nigerian couple, an Iranian convert, a student with a beautiful singing voice, a monk, and especially a flavor chemist who gave me a collection of beads on my birthday. There was always a dynamic circle of noncompatible people who could somehow get along passing through my house, and often staying.

I hear that people are beautiful even when they are broken. They can annoy me and also have an intensity, a depth that I can never know. All I do know is that people are to be felt and experienced, known well and embraced.  Maybe the peculiarities of their personalities are not such a defining factor as the simple fact that they are human souls.

I SING the Body electric;

The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves;

And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?

And if the body does not do as much as the Soul?

And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?

[Whitman, Walt (1949) Leaves of Grass, and Selected Prose. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.]

But dating served a real purpose. Criticize it all you want, but in its heyday, it was the socially accepted pathway to American marriage.  Dating allowed young men and women to explore the possibility of a life together without diving headlong into a unbridled sexual passion. The rules of dating were understood.  Yes, the rules were sometimes broken.  But they were strategically placed like guardrails along a highway which keep inexperienced drivers from careening off the road into a ditch.

Rules of responsible dating protected young people in countless ways.  For example, when immediate sexual gratification was not expected, guys were forced to take a girlfriend’s non-physical attributes more seriously when deciding if the relationship should move forward. Young women who were less physically alluring but were good prospects for marriage didn’t find themselves left out of the dating scene. Young men were expected to act like gentlemen. Young women were supposed to guard their reputations. If they did not, the social consequences were real.

Those rules are now gone.  So how did it happen?  You can blame the sexual revolution.  The youth culture of the 60’s and 70’s. The secularization of society.  The spread of pornography via the internet.

But the last nail in the coffin was this: Adult authority figures — parents, teachers, church leaders, and campus administrators — adopted a hands-off policy regarding youth and sex. Older people assumed that younger people were mature enough to make their own rules.  Not just their own decisions, but their own rules. That’s a huge distinction.

When young people who are attracted to one another are unable to discuss their hopes, values and intentions, they are engaging in the same non-conversation that the adults in their lives had with them.  Yes, these young people know all about the mechanics of sex.  If they didn’t learn it from a health teacher in middle school,  they certainly picked it up from the popular culture. But no one bothered to inform them how to interact with human beings. Not how to exchange bodily fluids, but how to honestly relate to one another, how to give and demand respect.

In the last two articles, we looked at ten major conclusions of a report on college women and their sexual relationships.  Here’s the final conclusion.

11. The lack of adult involvement, guidance, and even knowledge regarding how young people are dating and mating today is unprecedented and problematic. Parents, college administrators, and other social leaders have largely stepped away from the task of guiding young people into intimate relationships and marriage. Few older adults are aware of what hooking up or dating means for college students today, and the institutional arrangements of space on many campuses, such as coed dorms, clearly help to facilitate the hook up culture.

So I guess it’s Graham Spanier’s fault. (Just kidding. We have nothing against President Spanier.)

The report concludes with four recommendations.

1. Recognize that older adults, including parents, college administrators, and other social leaders, should have important roles in guiding the courting and mating practices of the young. The virtual disappearance of adult participation in, or even awareness of, how today’s young people find and marry one another should be seen as a major social problem, and should end.

2. Recognize that college women typically do not yearn for a series of “close relationships,” but instead the majority seek long-term commitment and marriage.

3. There appears to have been a reduction in male initiative in dating on college campuses. Recognize that the burden of dating and mating should not fall on women alone, and that there is a need for greater male initiative.

4. Support the creation of socially prescribed rules and norms that are relevant to and appropriate for this generation, and that can guide young people with much more sensitivity and support toward the marriages they seek. When it comes to inherently social acts such as romance and marriage, social rules do more than restrict individual choice, they also facilitate it. The absence of appropriately updated social norms, rituals, and relationship milestones leaves many young women confused, and often disempowered, in their relationships with men. Socially defined courtship is an important pathway to more successful marriages.

To expect college administrators to do anything about this in today’s cultural and political climate is hardly realistic. That is simply not going to happen. Especially at a secular public institution like Penn State.

But there is someone else who ought to try.

The leaders of campus religious organizations. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is us. And pastors and youth leaders of our local churches.

We have been warning young people about the dangers of going too far in terms of  physical and emotional intimacy. But how much have we positively done to create plausible pathways to healthy marriage? And what have we done to personally mentor the individuals whom God has brought into our lives in these very personal and private matters?

We have been content to let dating (whatever that means) continue in our ministries. In the present culture, a laissez-faire policy is not enough. Religious groups on campus may be one of the few remaining places where dating is still found. But what are the accepted rules of behavior?  Where are the social norms and expectations? 

Dating can shape the whole climate in a campus fellowship for better or for worse.  Usually worse.  You know what I mean. At the beginning of every fall semester, the most desirable  young believers begin to pair off.  While they are experiencing their own Rapture, the less attractive, introverted and socially awkward are Left Behind.

And those who are dating — do we really know what they are doing? Are we willing to get nosy and personal with these young people? Or do we just continue with ”don’t ask, don’t tell,” dispensing biblical principles and moral expectations from a safe and comfortable distance?

Hard thinking and hard work are needed to carry out Recommendation #4: Support the creation of socially prescribed rules and norms that are relevant to and appropriate for this generation, and that can guide young people with much more sensitivity and support toward the marriages they seek.

That is not going to happen by accident. We will have to work together. We will have to talk to one another. We are going to have to learn new things. We must look for new effective ways to  implement ancient wisdom with spiritual power and cultural savvy.

What do you say?

In the last article, we mentioned a report about attitudes and behaviors of American college women regarding their relationships with men. The practice of hooking up — a sexual encounter with no expectation of commitment — has become widespread. 

Not everyone is hooking up. In fact, most college women are not. But the practice and acceptance of hooking up (whatever that means, and the vagueness is often deliberate) has profoundly impacted the social climate.

At the other extreme, many couples are joined at the hip.  They act as though they are already married.  They spend all their free time together, sleep together, do laundry together.  They fall into this arrangement very quickly, perhaps just a few weeks after they first meet.  Despite the intensity of the relationship, the M-word never seems to come up.  “Marriage is for old people,” they tend to think.

Before they know it, someone gets seriously hurt.

The vagueness of male-female interactions, especially in the coed dorms, is a source of constant confusion and tension.  Where is the relationship going?  No one knows. Even worse, they don’t want to talk about it.

Well, maybe the girl wants to talk about it. But the guy deinitely does not.

The lack of assertiveness of the college male is a well documented phenomenon. He no longer asks women out on dates. He is eager to have sex, of course, but he won’t come clean about his intentions unless a woman forces him to.

Is this what romance is supposed to be?

Here are more findings from the report.

6. “Dating” carries multiple meanings for today’s college women. We found four widely used and different meanings for the term, two of which were more common. A college couple who is “dating” is sometimes in a fast-moving, highly committed relationship that includes sexual activity, sleeping at one another’s dorm most nights, studying together, sharing meals, and more, but rarely going out on “dates.” These fast-moving commitments and hooking up operate as two sides of the same coin. At the same time, “dating” is also often synonymous with “hanging out,” in which women and men spend loosely organized, undefined time together, without making their interest in one another explicit, unless they hook up, at which point dating and hooking up become the same thing.

7. College women say it is rare for college men to ask them on dates, or to acknowledge when they have become a couple. Only 50 percent of college women seniors reported having been asked on six or more dates by men since coming to college, and a third of women surveyed said they had been asked on two dates or fewer. Young women and men more often “hang out” rather than go on planned dates, and if they live in a coed dorm, their dorm is where they most often meet members of the opposite sex. They report that because they can hang out or hook up with a guy over a period of time and still not know if they are a couple, women often initiate “the talk” in which they ask, “Are we committed or not?” When she asks, he decides.

8. College women from divorced families differ significantly from women who grew up in intact families regarding marriage aspirations, getting advice from parents, and hooking up. Women from divorced families appeared more eager to marry, and wanted to marry sooner, but were less likely to believe that their future marriages would last. They were also less likely to report that they were raised with firm expectations about relationships with men, and less likely to report that their parents had told them to save sex for marriage. They were more likely to have hooked up, and if they did hook up, were more likely to have done so often —of women who had hooked up at least once, 37 percent of college women whose parents had divorced reported hooking up more than six times, compared with 23 percent of women from intact families.

9. There are few widely recognized social norms on college campuses that help guide and support young women in thinking about sex, love, commitment, and marriage. College women say they want to be married someday, and many would like to meet a future husband at college. Yet it seems that virtually no one even attempts to help them consider how their present social experience might or might not lead to a successful marriage, or how marriage might fit with other life goals.

10. As a result, the culture of courtship, a set of social norms and expectations that once helped young people find the pathway to marriage, has largely become a hook up culture with almost no shared norms or expectations. Hooking up, hanging out, and fast-moving (“joined at the hip”) commitments are logical, though we believe seriously flawed, responses to this disappearance of a culture of courtship. The options available to college women are obviously strongly influenced by choices that other young men and women make, but each young woman today tends to see her choices as wholly private and individual. For example, while most college women expect to marry for life and 88 percent would not personally consider having a child outside of marriage, 87percent agree that “I should not judge anyone’s sexual conduct except my own.” Consequently, when women are hurt or disappointed by the hook up culture, they typically blame themselves.

Perhaps you are thinking, “These women are making their own choices. If they get hurt, it’s their own fault.”  Really? 

Who is to blame for this state of affairs?  The girls?  The guys? Everyone? No one?

The answer may surprise you.  Stay tuned.  We shall continue.

Source of photo: www.christianphotos.net

Whatever position you might take on this, the debate might just be moot.

In an in-depth study of attitudes, values and behaviors of college women with respect to sexuality, researchers reported that dating — the traditional method of courtship of generations past — is officially dead.  Cultural expectations about how young men and women are supposed to act when exploring the possibilities for romance and marriage are completely gone.  Breaking the rules (for example, by having sex before marriage) used to be frowned upon.  But now the rules just don’t exist. Except for isolated examples here and there, the institution of dating is now extinct.

“No more rules! Hooray! We are free!” 

Not exactly.

The lack of socially prescribed rules and norms has left college aged young people — especially women — dazed and confused.  Not knowing what to do, they make awful choices that hinder their long term goals and aspirations.

You can read the full report here if you like.  But to give you an idea of what women are doing on campuses today, we will give you some of the major findings. 

1. Marriage is a major life goal for the majority of today’s college women, and most would like to meet a spouse while at college. Eighty-three percent of respondents in the national survey agreed that “Being married is a very important goal for me,” and 63 percent agreed that “I would like to meet my future husband in college.” Contrary to what we might think, today’s college women have high marital aspirations and many are actively thinking about marriage.

2. But there are important aspects of the college social scene that appear to undermine the likelihood of achieving the goal of a successful future marriage. For example, since 1980, women have outnumbered men attending college. In 1997, the sex ratio on-campuses nationally was only 79 men for every 100 women.

3. In addition, relationships between college women and men today are often characterized by either too little commitment or too much, leaving women with few opportunities to explore the marriage worthiness of a variety of men before settling into a long-term commitment with one of them.

4. “Hooking up,” a distinctive sex-without-commitment interaction between college women and men, is widespread on-campuses and profoundly influences campus culture, although a minority of students engage in it. Three-fourths of respondents agreed that a “hook up” is “when a girl and a guy get together for a physical encounter and don’t necessarily expect anything further.” A “physical encounter” can mean anything from kissing to having sex. In the national survey, 40 percent of women said they had experienced a hook up, and one in ten reported having done so more than six times. Women who had hooked up reported a range of feelings, positive and negative, about the practice. For example, 61 percent of college women who said that a hook up made them feel “desirable” also reported that it made them feel “awkward.” Hooking up commonly takes place when both participants are drinking or drunk.

5. To say “we hooked up” could mean a couple kissed, or had sex, or had oral sex, but no one will know for sure. Indeed, it appears that the ambiguity of the phrase “hooking up” is part of the reason for its popularity. Although premarital sex is much more acceptable now than in the past, women are still wary of getting a bad reputation. Saying “we hooked up” allows women to be vague about the nature of the physical encounter while stating that it happened.

What do you think about all this?

Stay tuned — there’s more to come.