Single, Dating, Engaged, Married by Ben Stuart

Author:Ben Stuart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2017-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

The evidence is in: Greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity. After all, pornography works in the most basic of ways on the brain: It is Pavlovian. An orgasm is one of the biggest reinforcers imaginable. If you associate orgasm with your wife, a kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over time, will turn you on; if you open your focus to an endless stream of ever-more-transgressive images of cybersex slaves, that is what it will take to turn you on. The ubiquity of sexual images does not free eros but dilutes it.22

This is not what young people want. Donna Freitas, research professor at Notre Dame, conducted a ten-year, nationwide research project on sexuality on college campuses. In her interviews, she found that 100 percent of college students said their peers are casual about sex. But 36 percent reported that they felt their peers were too casual about sex. That is one out of every three students who communicated to her that they did not like the dominant cultural narrative about sex.

When she addressed the issue of hooking up—meaningless, emotionless sexual encounters—she found even more surprising results. Forty-one percent of young people said hooking up made them feel “profoundly unhappy, disrespected, sad or abused.”23 The highest praise the other 59 percent could muster was “fine.” She found no student who claimed hooking up was awesome or amazing. Just “fine.” She reported that students often believe that hookups are their only option. Consequently, there’s a lot of suffering, alienation, and shame around hooking up for both men and women, and not living up to hookup culture’s expectations of ambivalence and callousness about sex.

But when asked what they want, college students reported to her over and over again that they desire to date. Frequently she heard that “nobody dates here, but I wish they would.” “I would go if someone asked me.” “I would ask someone if it wasn’t so weird.”

Dr. Freitas also heard time and again from young people they desired romance. Long hours of talking, dinners, picnics, and trips where they could share their thoughts and desires. She found that young people deeply long for the very thing that hook-up culture denies: emotional connection. Young people want to know and be known.24 You desire both emotional and physical connection. You desire to be a whole, integrated person. I would submit that you desire this precisely because God designed you this way. Your desires reveal your design.

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