How I started giving talks about hookup culture, dating and relationships is still a bit of a mystery to me, but one thing I know for sure is that about ten years ago I and many others at the university at which I work started to sense a genuine loneliness among our otherwise bright, involved, connected and accomplished students.
When I ask about their lives—not just about their academic lives, but about their personal, moral and spiritual lives—what troubles and saddens me more than whether or not they are having sex (though that certainly concerns me, no doubt), is how little sex and sexual intimacy even matters to them. Not only do many of them think that sex is “no big deal,” they usually display little hope that it will ever amount to all that much. They are deeply ambivalent about sex having any significant meaning, and in the context of their mostly ironic culture, they are not going to be duped by grand claims about intimacy, sexual or otherwise. As they say, it’s all “just a thing.” And they have plenty of evidence from their own lives, the lives of their families and friends, and from the wider, sexualized culture to prove it. As I started to really pay attention to what young adults were saying and doing in their hookups, dating and relationships, I detected what I would call a low-level, grinding despair.
That despair was on display in a question posed in a Q & A session following a talk I gave in a residential hall lounge packed full of first year students who were all about 6 months into their first year of college. The student thanked me for my talk on hook up culture and said that she wholly agreed with my critique of it. She went on to say that this was all well and good, but what she really wanted, or needed, to know was how to go about making herself not care while she was hooking up and partying. Her voice broke a bit as she asked her question and suddenly the room got really quiet and the question just hung in the air. She silently but openly wept as I responded that I would never, ever want to make it easier for her not to care about another person and or to ask so little for herself. She seemed completely emotionally exhausted. I must admit that though I get questions like this all the time from young adults, each time I am left a little breathless by it.
Many observers find the prevalence of hook-up culture on college campuses to be a signal of the last gasps of traditional courtship and dating. Still others view that conclusion as the “moral panic” of the old and unhip. But what happens when a group of 15 college students find themselves with the unusual assignment of going on a date—no hooking up, no hanging out, no opting out—and reporting back about the strategy, the fear, “the rules,” the ask, the drama, and the A-frame hugs? In this discussion, let’s consider what has really been lost and found in the “case of the lost social script” of college dating.
When I talk about hooking up, dating and relationships now, I do so in all sorts of venues and to all sorts of audiences, from large crowds in auditoriums to small groups in residence hall programs. And for the most part, I talk about it all without ever talking about sex, because I have found that what really concerns young adults—what really scares them, what fascinates them, what moves them—is not really a question of sex but rather a question of intimacy. In the midst of their ubiquitous posting and twittering and snapchatting, despite their seemingly constant connecting through all modes of social media, the students I meet speak overwhelmingly about feeling quite disconnected, lonely and fundamentally not known by others. This strikes me not as the death knell of relationships, or men or sex but as a crisis of intimacy. So what is it then that is missing in the lives of these young adults and how can we help them, and ourselves, find what is lost?
Clearly, intimacy is not an easy notion to understand. It is often only recognized in its absence. While we regularly reduce its meaning to the closeness of a sexual relationship, there’s little doubt that intimacy characterizes other relationships in our lives, those of parents and children, siblings, and good and caring friends. Isn’t intimacy with God what we strive for in our prayer lives? It strikes me as helpful to pose the question: what are we doing when we are being intimate with another person, and why is that being intimate?
Common to all of the intimate relationships in my life is one central and abiding fact: that I have the distinct feeling that I matter to the other person. I find that in those relationships, others who love me—my parents who are my best support, family members who’ve known me through all of the awkward moments of my life, friends who have been with me through bitterly sad and tremendously joyful times—share in my cares and concerns because I matter to them. And I in turn am willing to try to enter into the meanings and values of their lives and take their cares and concerns on as my own, not as facts and data, but as something meaningful and moving, because they matter to me. This may seem overly simplistic, but I have found it helpful in talking to young adults about intimacy because it allows me to ask if they notice the patterns in their different relationships—success and failures alike. Do you feel like you matter to your friends, your roommates, your older sister, your boyfriend or girlfriend? If so, how is that shown to you? Do you know how to show someone else that he truly matters to you? How do you know if you truly matter to him? How would you know? What do you do when it becomes clear that you don’t matter to a person you love? These are sometimes very painful questions to ask and answer. Young adulthood is when most of us first begin to recognize how very much is riding on our closest emotional ties. And it’s a lot. It is also often when we discover how devastatingly precarious some of those emotional ties can be.
As JPII rightly surmised and wrote about beautifully in his Theology of the Body, intimacy involves truly being seen by another. This seems really right to me. It is in the gaze of someone who thinks I truly matter, who wants to value what I value, who desires what I truly desire, who wants to understand what I mean when I speak and act, that I begin to be recognized and known in the way I really long for. That is the way of love that God wants for us, because it is the way that God loves us. In the lives of young adults, this isn’t easy to come by. Everyone has her own set of needs and worries, and the pace of keeping up and getting ahead means that really stopping and seeing another person or being seen demands so much time and asks perhaps too much of us. But again, intimacy is keenly felt in its absence, and young adults suffer its absence tremendously. What haunts them most is not the dismal job market, not their ballooning student loans, not the skyrocketing cost of living in most major American cities. What haunts them most is not ever being seen, or recognized, or loved by anyone outside of their own family circles. In worse cases, their fear is not mattering to anyone even within those most important first circles. In the very worst cases, there is the darkness of feeling that you do not matter even to God.
When I talk to students about these sorts of fears and desires and ask them to think about what they long for most in their lives, they assume that their desire to be loved and to be truly known by someone else will happen in marriage. While that will be true for most of them, I also ask them to consider the kinds of love and closeness they have in other relationships in their lives. In most cases, young people can identify at least one friend who fits the description of Aristotle’s “Friend of the Good,” the highest and best type of friendship depicted in his Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle points out that this type of friend sees and loves what is good in me, brings out what is good in me, and wants the best for me. But to truly wish the best for someone, you must know her well enough to identify what is best for her. And that involves knowing and seeing who she really is, not merely who she is for me. To be in a friendship like this activates our ability to be moved by someone else, to allow the meanings of my life to be moved and changed and transformed by someone who wants what is good for me, which is perhaps not fully known to me. Intimacy that is found in friendships like this shows us the best parts of ourselves and bring those parts out into the light. They also build in us a capacity for seeing and being seen, knowing and being known.
I don’t know about you, but even on a good day at mass when I’m knee-deep in the prayerful rhythm of a liturgy, I get all tangled up in the newly worded response, “I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof.” Because of my entanglement there, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it and it seems to me to be about the intimacy we long for with God.
Asking Christ to enter under my roof reminds me that intimacy marks the difference between living next to someone and dwelling with them—letting another person truly enter into my life, to move my cares and concerns and to be moved by his.
When you dwell with someone else— a friend, a spouse, Jesus— your reality becomes a shared reality and you make the horizon of that person’s meanings and values your own. You also let your meanings and values be carried and shaped by someone else. It seems to me that this is the answer to the question, what am I doing when I am being intimate? To the further question, why is that being intimate? Well, when I ask my students about intimacy in their own lives, they usually default to a popular Facebook adage: “it’s complicated.” You’ve got that right.
KERRY CRONIN is associate director of the Lonergan Institute and Philosophy Department Fellow at the Center for Student Formation at Boston College.