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Donna Freitas, author of "The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy," believes increasingly promiscuous behavior among youth and young adults is causing untold harm.
In a March 31, 2013, Washington Post article, "Time to Stop Hooking Up?" she writes, "Traditions such as dates and get-to-know-you conversations before physical intimacy are deemed unnecessary or even forbidden. The guiding commandment of hookup culture: Thou shalt not become attached to your partner."
What?
I couldn't help thinking of this approach to relationships being like a completely inverted food pyramid, one in which sugar-packed desserts become the first course, the main course and the only course. Needless to say, hookups lack even the most basic ingredients to build and sustain a healthy relationship and a happy life.
Freitas has spent the past eight years talking with students, faculty members and college administrators about hookup culture, and finds, not surprisingly, that 41% of respondents in her research used words like "regretful," "empty," "miserable," "disgusted," "ashamed," "duped," and even "abused" to describe their experience.
"Hookup sex is fast, uncaring, unthinking, perfunctory," she writes. "It has less to do with excitement or attraction than with checking a box on a list of tasks, like homework or laundry. Yet it has become the defining aspect of social life on many campuses..."
Here's the "pyramid" of factors necessary for deeply satisfying, lifelong unions I created for my 1997 book, "Lasting Marriage: The Owners' Manual":
"Happily ever after" is far too important to risk getting it wrong. Lasting success in the relationship department calls for starting with a strong foundation, building with enduring commitments, and then, and in that order, celebrating with lifelong, heart-throbbing delight.
It's a God-inspired plan with a lifetime warranty.
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