Casual Sex, No Casual Dating, No Courtship

My students report an alarming fact. They live in an environment, they say, in which there is casual sex, but no casual dating. Why would that be?

One reason there might be so little casual dating is because of the widespread presumption that a date is supposed to lead to casual sex. Thus, if you’re the type of person who isn’t interested in casual sex—and studies suggest that, more and more, young people aren’t—then you probably shy away from “dates” with all the baggage that might come along with it.

In one sense, there is something good about this. If more young people are avoiding situations where casual sex is expected, so much the better. It’s not that they don’t want sex; it’s usually the case that they’ve been hurt badly, or they know others who have been hurt badly, and they would prefer not to get burned again. This is sensible, but also a little tragic. It’s a shame that the errors of the “sexual revolution” of the Boomer generation continue to infect the culture so that we can’t have nice things anymore, like civilized public spaces and innocent dating.

That’s one way of looking at it. But the problems may lie even deeper. It’s easy to blame the Boomers and the sexual revolution. (I just did.) It’s harder to accept that the problems may have infected some of our most basic cultural presuppositions, even those we consider pure and virtuous.

Considerations from the perspective of biological adulthood

Let’s consider the problem from a different perspective. What if (as I think a study of history would show) wise cultures recognize that young women become biologically adult—that is to say, they can reproduce the species—at roughly 13 or 14, and that young men, who are usually a few years behind, become biologically adult at 15 or 16. Having recognized this biological fact, wise cultures take serious steps to ensure that these young adults who are now biologically capable of reproducing the species will soon be socially capable of doing so.

In such cultures, children are allowed to be children until 12 or 13. They are allowed to play; they are encouraged to explore the world in wonder; and they are never made the subject of sexual interest, as it would be inappropriate for their stage of development. But at 12 or 13, they are usually taken from among their playmates and thereafter will spend most of their time with adults, getting ready to enter the adult world. At 13, young men were apprenticed. On farms, most young men and women at that age were already involved in working the family farm. But at 13 or 14, the responsibilities and obligations would increase. The goal was to make these young people ready for adulthood and adult responsibilities, to family and society. Wise cultures understood that those biological desires for sexual union would likely soon be in force, so they had better make these young people ready to discipline those energies and turn them into something fruitful.

What do we do? When our young people get to be 13 or 14, we have them spend all their time with other teens, where they will certainly never get good advice on sex, marriage, work, or most of the other things they need to know to have a happy, flourishing adulthood. Thus, most of our time is spent disabusing teens of the utterly disastrous things they were told by their fellow teens or those who specialize in marketing things to teens by appealing to their insecurities or their ill-formed desires.

Because we have lived with it so long, we fail to realize that we created something we call “adolescence.” The word adolescens goes back to ancient Latin. But if you were an “adolescent” in the Roman world, you were a “young adult” being prepared to be a full-fledged adult, so you had to shut up and learn. In our culture, adolescence often means a period of development when young people have all or most of the freedoms of adulthood, but with few or none of the responsibilities.

The culture of expressive, autonomous individualism and “unencumbered selves”

During this time, they are supposed to “find themselves.” It should not be surprising, given our modern creation of adolescence, if what they find is that they are basically what sociologists Robert Bellah described as “expressive individualists.” What they find is that they are a “self-creating, autonomous self”— or what political philosopher Michael Sandel calls an “unencumbered self.”

According to this conception of the individual, persons are not obligated to fulfill ends or purposes they have not chosen — ends given by nature or God, or by their identities as members of “families, peoples, cultures, or traditions.” An “encumbered identity,” entailed by membership in such groups, is assumed to be antagonistic to the conception of the person as “free and independent, unencumbered by aims and attachments it does not choose for itself….”

The problem with this view, as Prof. Sandel argues, is that this view of the self “cannot account for certain moral and political obligations that we commonly recognize, even prize.” These include “obligations of solidarity with the poor and disadvantaged, religious duties such as the obligation to treat the dead with respect, and other moral ties such as those to family and/or extended family which may lay claim on us prior to our choosing them.”

So too, another problem is that, as Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, to become these “self-creating, autonomous selves”—or what he terms “independent practical reasoners”—we must be raised and guided by those who have been willing to make our good their own apart from any expectation of recompense. In other words, the creation of “self-creating, autonomous, expressive selves” depends on the help and guidance of those who have devoted themselves to us selflessly and thus have not devoted themselves to being “self-creating, autonomous, expressive selves.” Self-creating, autonomous, expressive selves do not generally take it upon themselves to produce children to whom they must devote themselves selflessly.

The result is this: My students, even the best of them, when asked, “Are you ready for kids?” will reply: “Absolutely not!” Nothing in society has prepared them to make the needs of others their own, and they are aware of this lack, even if implicitly. They aren’t ready to “compromise” on their trajectory of expressive individualism, and that trajectory has rarely been expressed to them as something that involves the self-giving of marriage and family.

They have been trained to think of “rights”, not of “responsibilities” or “obligations.” The most driven and intense of them have often been parented with a kind of selfless seriousness that they would consider stifling. They live in a culture that says, “Well, you might have some casual sex—it happens—but do not get pregnant and don’t get married. These things ‘tie you down.’” And you need to “become yourself” first and create your own expressive identity.

Waiting … how long?

Now, consider the paradox that such autonomous “unencumbered” selves find themselves in when they reach biological adulthood. When these teens reach the age when their sexual yearning is brimming, those who care about their welfare as autonomous, self-creating, expressive selves tell them—to wait.

How long?

In the 1950s, it was hard enough to get young people to wait until they finished high school. Now we tell them to wait until they’re done with college … and graduate school … and have a job. So, maybe until they’re 25 or 30. Really? They can at 16, and we expect them to wait another 10, 15, or 20 years? We are cruel or stupid.

Of course, most people don’t really expect young people to wait. Hence, the acceptance of some “experimental,” “casual” sex. It would be “unhealthy” to wait, wouldn’t it? Or so psychology (since Freud) has insisted. You’ve got to “get out there” and “get some experience.” Too often, this is the experience of some severe heartbreak. (On this, see the chapter on “The Shadow Side of Sexual Liberation” in Christian Smith’s book Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood.)

But these things sounded so good on paper when couched in terms like “liberation” and “psycho-sexual development.”

Why date if there’s no courtship?

Now consider the situation of a young man and woman in high school or college living with these cultural expectations.

The results can be predicted. Why date? Dating is a form of courtship, and the one thing they know is that they’re not ready for kids and not ready for marriage. Thus, “getting serious” is out of the question.

So what would dating be for, then? If not courtship, its sole remaining purpose would be as a precursor to a sexual hookup. This is looked down upon, but permitted, as long as pregnancy is avoided or abortions are available for those “in need” of this form of “liberation.” If you’ve been raised to stay away from such things the way you’ve been raised to avoid smoking and drugs, then just as you, if you’re a “good kid,” generally avoid parties and bars where there is a lot of smoking and drugs, so too, you stay away from dating that might lead to hookups, because the results can be equally disastrous to your future. To the extent that hooking up has become a widespread expectation in the culture—it was what rushed in to fill the void left by “no courtship”—those who aren’t interested in hooking up will date little or not at all.

There never really was any “casual” dating. Dating has always been associated with potential courtship. If you’re not interested in courtship, what do you do? You go out with friend groups in which there might be some of the opposite sex. And you might become good friends with some of them. But “dating” as something serious? Since it comes with all this emotional or biological baggage, absolutely not.

Am I suggesting that 14- or 15-year-olds get married? I am always asked this question, so let me address it directly. Given what I’ve said above, the answer should be an obvious no. No way. Ours is a culture that has studiously avoided, almost entirely, preparing young people for marriage and family. Thus, one should expect that, even if people get married at 25 or 30, many marriages will fail. And that is what we find. A culture that spends years and years trying to get its young people ready for jobs (and can’t even do that especially well) but spends almost no time whatsoever preparing them for the responsibilities of marriage and family—what would you expect?

You should expect exactly what we have. It’s not happy. In fact, it’s mostly tragic. But like many things that are bad for us that we’ve become accustomed to, we’re not likely to give it up anytime soon. I get that.

Please, though, in the meantime, don’t complain about how there’s no dating. Until and unless we deal with these more fundamental issues, encouraging them to “date” would just be leading these young people into some meaningless encounters that simulate something from the past. But the whole reason for that activity has now been lost, so it’s not really dating anyway. It would mostly be a counterfeit of the real thing. Young people aren’t stupid; they know this.

When they’re ready for marriage and family, they’ll date. It won’t be easy because, at that point, they’ll be trying to put their “unencumbered autonomous” lives together with other autonomous “unencumbered” selves. But until marriage and family become a possibility for them — until it is supported culturally as part and parcel of a flourishing human life — “dating” is pointless. Or worse yet, it’s likely to be a rocky road to some serious heartbreak.

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