This Valentine’s Day, it’s fitting that we consider the things we associate with romance. Behind the dim restaurants, low voices, glasses of wine, inviting smiles or whatever other mental furniture you conjure up lie the ideas of commitment and emotional security. You may instinctively disagree, but consider that only 9 percent of millennials say that they never want to be married, which, though a higher percentage than older generations, is still less than one in 10. Most of us have an innate desire for this kind of lifelong connection with another person, in which we can be vulnerable about ourselves and still be accepted.
But college culture as I see it is not conducive to this end goal of marriage, which most of us have in mind for at least the distant future. The relaxing of sexual standards in Western culture as a whole has eroded traditional morality and disassociated sex from romance by teaching people to put themselves first in relationship and use others to get what they want. According to a 20-year sexuality survey released in 2014, “being in love as an important component of sex has fallen sharply from about 70 percent in the early 1990s to now less than half of college students seeing it as important.”
In trying to discern the flaws of college culture when it comes to sex and relationships, it’s necessary to draw the distinction between romantic love and mere sexual desire. For the purposes of this article, I’ll refer to the former as love and the latter as lust. Romantic love has an element of sexual desire, but is much more than it. In his book The Four Loves, British author and academic C.S. Lewis puts it like this: “Sexual desire, without Eros (romantic love), wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved.” This wanting of the beloved includes sex, but is not reducible to mere sexual appetite.
Lust desires its object’s body for the pleasure it can give. Love desires all of the beloved, to share with him or her time, space, belongings, interests and in other words, all of life. It offers all of itself in return.
If you’re skeptical, think about on the non-romantic relationships you’ve had over the course of your life with family, friends and classmates. The ones in which people valued you for yourself rather than anything you could do for them are the ones you would call good or successful. In these contexts, we are usually quick to discern and complain when someone is using us, that is, pursuing a relationship for the sake of getting something out of us. So why should we treat romantic relationships any differently?
There have always been outlets for lust — prostitution comes to mind — but the really harmful thing is when one party is using the relationship as a pretense for lust while the other thinks love is mutual. What is so treacherous about the collapse of sexual standards is that it enables people to use the front of love for merely lustful purposes, leading men to expect to get sex without obligations and women to settle for sex without emotional commitment.
I admittedly have not surveyed fellow students about this topic, but from many interactions and overheard conversations, I perceive that many girls feel that they are expected to have sex with their boyfriends after they’ve been dating for a while, regardless of whether they want it or not. While there will always be young people having casual sex, I think a culture that pressures them to do so for whatever reason — whether boredom or peer pressure or to keep their partner from leaving — is a bad one.
I’m not calling for rules or regulations on sexual morality (which would be ineffectual anyway), but for a change in culture. Like I said before, most people really do aspire to a committed romantic relationship, the original ‘safe space’ where you can be accepted and loved without fear of rejection. The ideal for this, as upheld by most cultures throughout history, is marriage, which, as young people seem to have forgotten, was the original goal of dating. So let’s change dating culture one relationship at a time to restore sex to its proper context of emotional fulfillment and relational security.