The college dating scene...

It’s been 3 days since I've posted anything. Damn. I've been visiting a friend, and I haven’t had any time to get a post up. I'm working on one, but I want it to read well, so I'm waiting on it. In the mean time, I'm going to treat u 2 a little gossip! *giggle* Oh - my god, I was watching TV a couple of days ago, and there was a special on the show "Chicago Tonight" about the college dating scene. It was a commentary on a special done in the Chicago Sun-Times on how the college dating scene has changed. They had a panel of current students and analysts who sat with the host and painted a rather morbid picture of an American student body which had morally lost its moorings. College students, they said, are living in such an incredibly charged sexual environment that true relationships are suffering. Relationships, they said, had degenerated to the idea of the "hook-up," i.e. sex in the manner of a mafia man, "a hit and run" experience, bada-bing, bada-boom and its over. They were stuck in a maelstrom of peer pressure that had as its dictum "materialistic sex," i.e. that having sex before dating was okay, and that it is better to have no strings attached. Put simply, the parentheses of the statement were the college environment is becoming a cesspool of polygamous immorality. To someone with a love of traditional values, this could be seen as an affront to the social order, and as the ultimate proof that secular relativism was leading our society to an existential cesspool of demonic lust, where having sex with the next thing that moved is seen as high social etiquette. This article is meant to reassure those who think that. Instead of being representative of a deterioration of morals, the current "sexually charged environment" is actually a result of a restructuring of the courtship ladder. Let me explain how.

In the last 50 years, we have been constantly told that what truly matters are the core character qualities of the human being. Things like sexual orientation, skin color, and economic class are ephemeral trappings that are shuffled off with our mortal coil; they aren't what truly matters when interacting with another person. Unfortunately, sex has been grouped into this category as something nice, but also something that does not, and should not define relationships. it is true love and interactions of the soul that should. Sex is not love.What has resulted is a change in dating attitudes from what I will call the traditional dating structure, to what I will call the dating neostructure.
I will outline both and what the differences are. Remember, these are idealized.

The traditional dating structure is as follows. The man is the initiator. It is his job to court the girl, get her to like him, convince her that it is him that she should be interested in above all else. During this time, both would be sexually inactive and contact would be limited to hugs, gift giving, talking, etc. When things get more serious, the guy would ask the girl out on a date if the answer was no, it would end there. If the answer was yes, official Dating would start. Once the couple was dating, they would have the green light to start a dance of descent toward sex. 1) Hand holding 2) Kissing...n)sex. Sex would represent a culmination off all efforts and the ultimate expression of love, and that would be the only role that sex would fulfill. This model still is the standard, "ideal" date structure, but it is not the one that is being used today in college. The neostructure is as follows.

In today's colleges, there is what I would like to call an "Open Market" that exists before the realm of dating. It is essentially a big free for all where everything that used to only happen while one was dating happens much quicker, and with no strings attached. It is very complicated. In the Open Market social mentality, things like cuddling, hugging, sitting on laps, kissing on the cheek, etc. are considered an expression of friendly love. Everyone who is social can do this without fear of repercussions. The next step would be "hooking up." This is sexual interaction with no strings attached, a high speed dance of descent that occurs before there is any commitment. At this point, it goes two ways. Either the "F***-buddy" mentality continues, or the people start a relationship and become truly girlfriend and boyfriend. There are several things expected in a relationship, the first and foremost of which is good old-fashioned fidelity. It is also expected that a relationship will give something on the personal level. The relationship in the dating neostructure is just as deep, if not deeper than what went on before, and from this point on, they are ideally the same.

To summarize the difference in one sentence, whereas before the order was low key flirting, dating and relationship, then sex, the order is now a free market where the joys of the flesh are traded with less shame, then relationship. So ultimately, whatever new stresses arise from this new structure, I do not think that it is all that threatening. It is merely a new order to what went on before. Sleep easy my friends. The college world isn't going to pot.