Msgr Pope ping
I still “date” my wife after 38 years. At least that’s what we call it......
I recently learned that now kids have friends, or friends + benefits.
The feminist movement is what happened.
They told us these ideas of courtship were relics of an oppressive chauvinist era. Hooking up, abortion, venereal disease and single motherhood are so much better.
Young people need immediate gratification. Nothing “takes time”. I meet a lot of young couples (I’m a Realtor) that have met through Match.com etc. There they can meet the “perfect mate” and then “hook up”.
It’s all in the teleology.
Young ladies have power that they don’t realize they have.
My older son is in college. Most people don’t “date” regularly and few people form relationships oriented toward marriage. There are some folks who are “in a relationship,” which mostly means that they have sex exclusively with each other, but not with any great long-term commitment.
Yet, it seems, some marriages do result from some of these relationships over time. Many young folks DO want to find husbands and wives, and DO want to marry, but the social conventions under which they labor frustrate their secret desires.
My son, one of a small set of Rigid, un-Frankian, Judgmental, Morally-Stern, Antequarianly-Chaste Catholics on campus, has had no lack of pretty, sweet, interesting, intelligent young women to date since arriving on campus a year and a half ago. And the dates are old-fashioned dates. An afternoon at the museum. Dinner at the club. A movie. A Catholic social event. A school dance. He’s also engaged in “group dates” from which he’s identified young ladies wishing to be dated one-on-one by him.
He also has been very firm about three rules, and very public, as well. He is interested in dating romantically to find someone to marry. She must be (or become) a Catholic. No sex before marriage.
Although I don’t think anyone openly ridiculed him (he’s in a place that is surprisingly tolerant), I know that he raised many eyebrows.
He has had no lack of young ladies interested in having a more serious, exclusive dating relationship with him. In fact, his girlfriend last semester was a young girl brought up as an atheist who was willing to consider conversion in order to further the relationship toward marriage. Once he realized that her inability to accept the concept of Original Sin doomed the relationship, he broke up with her. But, even though they had a pretty deep emotional bond, because they’d never had sex, the break-up was sad, but reasoned, without much drama. The young lady agreed with his conclusion that although they both had very strong feelings for each other, their respective worldviews were just too different to enable them to form a happy, permanent relationship.
Swiftly, he found himself sought out by another young lady to date seriously who had almost literally been “waiting in the wings.” She is a fallen-away Lutheran who is more than willing to come into communion with the Church in order to marry him. I suspect that they are much more compatible, and it would be unsurprising if they were to eventually marry. But if they don’t, my son is aware of other young ladies on campus who would love the opportunity to date him seriously.
Many, many intelligent young women are starving for good, decent men who want nothing more than to find someone to love them with all their hearts as Christ loves the Church, and to date in order to find the right person who will love them in that way. But few young men seem ready to emulate my son’s model.
His young gentlemen friends are astonished that it’s as if the young ladies line up to date him, with the goal of determining whether or not marriage to him is a realistic prospect.
My son’s a bright guy, has a sterling personality, is kind and generous (but also has a biting wit), is a good, honest, decent, loyal friend, is pretty good looking, and hard-working. But on his campus, there are plenty of smarter, handsomer, stronger, brilliant, hardworking young gentlemen of good character, too.
But they are merely taking their cue from the ladies, most of whom give no overt signals that this is what they want from their male prospects. When my son went to college, he was pretty firm about how he was going to conduct himself. But he told us that he despaired of finding anyone who wanted to date seriously, take the time to form a deep relationships, take delight in each others’ personality, who wanted to explore the possibility of marriage, who would understand the importance of sharing religious faith and belief, and who would be willing to wait for marriage. The young ladies weren’t giving any signals that they were receptive to such overtures, that they would like to date, rather than just all go out in groups, or keep it all “just friends,” or engage in casual sex. Even the girls in the Catholic Student Association didn’t seem to engage in the flirting and behaviors that encourage the gentlemen to ask them out on real dates.
However, knowing upfront my son’s intentions, absolutely not one young lady has turned him down for an initial date. A couple ladies have had previous engagements for specific events to which he’d asked them, but they made quite clear to him that they would like to be asked out again by him for a more mutually-convenient time. “I’m not interested,” hasn’t been in the lexicon of any young lady he’s asked out.
And among his gentlemen friends, many wish they would attract the ladies thusly, as many are secretly marriage-minded, too. But they’re trapped within social conventions which are sub-optimal and lead to messy, damaging relationships that hurt everyone all around. Or no relationship at all.
When one denies the purpose of things, one frustrates the means as well as their end.
And actually, “dating” was a step down from going out with a chaperone, or meeting in the parlor. Yes, it was a better way, especially when hormones have the upper hand.
So far my girls have stuck to dating. Another benefit of dating is that breakups are less painful.
I wish I had followed that approach in my teen years, but dating was passe even in the 70s.
A couple of thoughts, first, you need a job to finance a date. Second why pay for a meal when what you want is given away for free. Kids don’t relate face to face much anymore. If you aren’t sexually immoral, a young person is likely to be put at severe temptation when alone with a typical person without such scruples.
Do schools still have dances on Friday night?? If they are, there is probably DIRTY DANCING and TWERKING happening...YUK!
I dunno what to think...the young people I know are out and about, circulating, dating etc.
I am not THAT old, but count me as also horrified by this “hook-up” culture which has overtaken college campi.
When I was in college, you aspired to date. Often for the wrong reasons....hormone-driven infatuation with the prettiest girls. But you did, and you did attempt to build some kind of relationships with women in the process.
Today it is so cold and impersonal, I have no idea what these kids see in it.
Ping!
My generation didn't date. Honestly, I know guys my age (late 30’s) that have had many serial one night stands, but have told me they have never had a relationship.
People don't know how. It is either right to bed, or there is something “wrong”. I ran into this when I was single. Had one girl break it off because I didn't try to get her into bed by the second date (she was sure I was gay).
Dating stopped in 1973, in my hometown. With birth control and abortion, there were a slew of girls who would put out. It quickly became accepted. My friends were victims of date rape. Prom was the worst. The clergy, I hate to tell the good Msgr, have been absent for us for forty years. It is the start point, in many ways, to the attack on the family
Their rejection of Humanae Vitae continues to this day. Homosexuality is taking over st Patrick’s day. Where is the USCCB? Vying for illegal immigrants rights. They are being led by Jose Gomez, anigrant, who has no legal right as an immigrant, I don’t care if he IS an archbishop, to effect public policy
The priests could embrace Humanae Vitae and understand the effects of BC and abortion on our children
Ugh. The flames and smoke coming out of my ears are going to draw emergency response. Id better stop
bkmk
I’m a Christian, not Catholic, former lesbian, in my 40’s. The Lord has led me away from what I have a college degree in from a secular school, English, because, as He showed me, the imaginations of the world are prideful, without hope and intending to cause moral confusion. So I work a low-wage job instead, but believe I have a close relationship to the Lord. In the modest life I lead, I have no end of men and women in their twenties who want to initiate a sexual relationship with me, saying “age is just a number.”
It saddens me to see how confused they are in looking for love and trying everything the world tells them to try today, and of course then they don’t find it. I see these young people, and others, like this woman in her 20’s with several children taken from her by the state, who’s pregnant by one man but going to be with her true-love fiancee in another state, as she tells me. In almost the same breath, though, she remarks about the hickeys on her neck. And, she posts Bible verses on (Cont’d)
Facebook and seeks prayer for one of her children, adopted out, who needs surgery. The family she came from is broken itself, and she’s heavily into Miley Cyrus, everything vampires, etc. What so many young people need are older Christians to open their lives to them, care about them, and be people they can dependably turn to, without there being expectations that things will get better quicky. The moral confusion is so bad today that it can take a long time for young people raised in it to become familiar with God’s ways.
A young man--or, for that matter, a man of any age--should feel downright privileged to share, for even a little while, the company of a good woman with a complementary personality. Just hopping into bed with a quick "hookup" is hardly the same thing...