Rethinking Sex: Building Healthy Relationships In A Hook-Up World
I’m live-blogging from the Rethinking Sex conference at Harvard. Sponsored by the Love & Fidelity Network and True Love Revolution (the campus abstinence group), the conference was advertised with the following description:
“Do what feels right.”
“Just be yourself.”
These are the most common pieces of advice young adults receive when approaching relationships. Casual sexual relationships dominate the dating scene, break-ups and heartbreaks abound, marriages dissolve, and young adults struggle to know where to learn the skills needed to build healthy, stable relationships.
We recognize a great need among young men and women for practical education on how to build and sustain healthy, stable, and meaningful relationships.
“Rethinking Sex: Building Healthy Relationships in a Hook-up World” aims to inform and educate young adults about how to approach interpersonal relationships in a healthy and meaningful way, with an eye towards laying a foundation for strong marriages in the future.
The conference will feature an outstanding line-up of prestigious psychologists ready to share their expertise. The sessions will focus on what the psychological sciences and clinical research have to teach us about human intimacy, love, mate selection, and friendship and the relationship skills needed to find success in these areas.
I’ll be live-blogging this throughout the day. The opening remarks, made by TLR co-president Rachel Wagley, included a quote from Professor Leon Kass (University of Chicago):
“The very terms wooing, courting, suitors are archaic [and even TLR doesn’t use those words] but today, there are no socially prescribed forms of conduct . lack a cultural script for marriage. the privileged, college-educated - Today, there are no socially prescribed forms of conduct that help guide young men and women in the direction of matrimony…. People still get married — though later, less frequently, more hesitantly, and, by and large, less successfully. For the great majority, the way to the altar is uncharted territory: It’s every couple on its own bottom, without a compass, often without a goal. Those who reach the altar seem to have stumbled on it by accident.”
This comes from an essay that also includes the following:
“Once female modesty became a first casualty of the sexual revolution, even women eager for marriage lost their greatest power to hold and to discipline their prospective mates. For it is a woman’s refusal of sexual importunings, coupled with hints or promises of later gratification, that is generally a necessary condition of transforming a man’s lust into love. Women also lost the capacity to discover their own genuine longings and best interests. For only by holding herself in reserve does a woman gain the distance and self-command needed to discern what and whom she truly wants and to insist that the ardent suitor measure up. While there has always been sex without love, easy and early sexual satisfaction makes love and real intimacy less, not more, likely — for both men and women. Everyone’s prospects for marriage were — are — sacrificed on the altar of pleasure now.”
Courtship? Maybe it’s overrated.
