You do, that’s who. But why? I don’t get it.
The Boston Globe published a story Friday about one Boston College professor’s effort to “revive the lost art of dating.” The prof, bless her good intentions, is offering extra credit to students that go on real face to face dates, brought about by an in-person proposal. She wants students to forgo the smart phone generation’s preferred course of romantic interaction, which is apparently to smash genitals with strangers, and instead employ the bygone practice of courtship, in all its yawn-and-stretch-and-drape-that-arm-over-her-shoulder glory.
Quote: “[D]ating is so rare it feels strange and even creepy. Instead, students use friendships and groups to satisfy social and emotional needs and see hookups as purely physical. But as a result, [Professor Kerry] Cronin says, students don’t have a relationship that allows them to address the confusions or expectations that can arise out of hookups.”
There’s nothing wrong at all with promoting healthy relationships and addressing these points of confusion, especially considering, as the most recent Census data suggests, 100% of all the country’s college students are lubberly squids that need all the help they can get in this regard. The problem is the idea these people have somehow betrayed traditional values by not navigating the romantic landscape as their parents did.
Admittedly, it’s easy to prove a point with Internet comments on any given story, but you’ve very likely seen this attitude a million times over, so it’s hardly cherry-picked:
“[S]o many missed opportunities because people are looking at their smart phones instead of what’s around them! The technology generation has unfortunately made social etiquette and customs quaint and old fashioned.”
Eighteen likes.
“[T]hey run into each other and hook up,” added another. “Then there’s 9 texts or so and if there’s a tenth text then they’re a couple.”
So if two people communicate with one another for a while and they seem to like having the other’s sex parts in or around their own, they become an item? That sounds more or less exactly how relationships have gone since time immemorial.
There likely is some validity to the idea that more relationships today start in the bedroom, rather than, say, on a Ferris wheel or over a singular milkshake with two straws, but is that inherently a bad thing? It’s no longer taboo to have sex – never mind before marriage – with anyone whose sex-making seems possibly compatible with one’s own, so long as it is safe and consensual.
The Globe article adds that 63 percent of college-age men and 83 percent of college-age women “would prefer a traditional relationship to an uncommitted sexual one” anyway. So who cares how they get there?
