Our 17-year-old son has disclosed something surprising to us, but perhaps common in today’s youth culture. Read on, and let me know what you think.
No, he is not a homosexual. But he does seem counter-cultural, particularly in how he approaches teenaged dating. Here’s his dilemma: A number of our son’s teenaged friends have told him lately that, if he just made a commitment, he could have a girlfriend. These young people—many from good, Christian families--have told him that he could have plenty of dates if he only chose a girlfriend first. Remarkably, he responded with a wisdom and maturity that I wish I had possessed at his age. He argued back to his peers that dating wasn’t supposed to work that way. He asserted that dating should come first, and if he found someone he really liked, he could pick a girlfriend. He also reasoned that, as he gets older, the narrowing down process will continue into engagement and someday probably marriage. Maybe he should bring this discussion up in his Statistics class. As a senior in high school, he’s looking forward to college and maybe graduate school. He’s in no hurry to select a mate.
Select a mate! That sounds so biological! Why is a blog dedicated to Christian families speaking about dating or courtship in such coarse, biological terms? The answer is simple. Mating or procreation is the goal and purpose of marriage. All the other stuff that moderns talk about—companionship, shared responsibilities, common goals, complimentary values—are important factors towards healthy relationships, but they mean nothing without biology. God endowed each human being with a biological drive, and even at that level of raw instinct, human beings tend to be remarkably selective. Call it magnetic attraction. Honestly, how frequently do a young man and a young woman really have magnetic attraction? One in a hundred, one in a thousand, one in ten thousand times?
Of course, these relatively rare moments of intersexual magnetism are not sufficient cause for mating and procreation. And human beings are capable of resisting these biological urges. Nonetheless, the existence and struggle with these impulses can be wonderfully instructive and enlightening for young people. In short, if God made them magnetically attracted to certain individuals, they should be aware of the attractions and the patterns they represent. Unbalanced, their impulses will lead them astray; absent of the propensities, their lives will lack motivation. A recent example that I heard on Christian radio is illustrative: A college freshman, reeling from a bad relationship, asked something like this: “Should I select my next partner in a relationship based on compatibility or chemistry?” The psychologist/minister guest didn’t have an answer on the spot. But the answer was obvious—both and more! You should choose your mate not just based upon compatibility or chemistry, but both and more including common values, goals, and beliefs. God gave young men and women brains to figure out the logic of compatibility, but also sexual urges to harness, drive, and motivate them. Just as it would be foolish to pursue a sexual attraction with an otherwise incompatible mate, it would also be folly to commit to a partner with whom one had no sexual magnetism.
A lot is written today about compatibility. For the most part, compatibility boils down to what I talked about in a previous blog—identity. Until a young person’s identity has begun to coalesce, that young person will be incapable of forming an intimate sexual relationship with another human being. Any entanglement between two immature individuals (i.e. without developed identities) can only result in the negation of each partner’s identity or the domination of one over the other. In other words, adolescents who attempt to engage in sexual intimacy will either experience their own budding identities dissolving into the quagmire or becoming subject to the domination of another. These are hardly the goals of liberalism or feminism, the very movements that espouse sexual freedom for adolescents! In other words, though a significant portion of today’s adolescents are sexually active, they are developmentally incapable of experiencing intimacy.
Today’s pandemic of sex without intimacy is made possible by one modern invention in particular—birth control. In today’s secular society, biology is something to be thwarted. The modern secular world is guilty of circumventing the natural, sexual biology of young people. Today’s non-Christian family (and, sadly, sometimes the Christian family) has a condom drawer in some discrete location for the children to use, no questions asked. Or the children simply procure prophylactics gratis from school or the health department. In a pinch, they’ll go to the drug store. Just as often, mothers cart their pubescent daughters off to the doctor or health department for birth-control pills or shots. This viewpoint seems fairly representative of the secular perspective on the topic. The net result of all this contraception is that young people are removed from an intimate awareness of their sexuality, particularly the feelings that are inherent to sexual attraction.
The behavioral disconnect occurs because sexual intercourse, now under the wavering thumb of contraception, ceases to have any expected consequence. Young people today feel free to experiment with their sexuality without regard to producing children and therefore without the need of the life-long commitment it takes to raise a child. Nonetheless, their instinctive yearning for fidelity and reliability remains, and they often find themselves irrationally jealous or possessive. Without any concrete reason for these inherent emotions, they repress their feelings and continue to behave in ways that only exacerbate theirs and their partners’ emotions. Some examples are promiscuity and serial monogamy. Without the palpable fear of childbirth, many young people lack the discernment to avoid fornication. They fail to connect sexuality to the profound emotional attachments it produces. They repress their awareness of their own human nature, pretending not to feel angry, jealous, or hurt when they or their partner moves on to the next bed-mate.
The casual attitude toward birth control may have biological consequences as well. Though human beings are capable of sexual intercourse outside of periods of fertility, the human species is nonetheless influenced by fertility. Though human men are capable of sex with a partner incapable of getting pregnant, they are instinctively most attracted to ovulating females. From this reasoning, it follows that sex with a woman who is on birth control (essentially feigning pregnancy and incapable of procreation) is likely to take on a completely different nature than sex between two fertile individuals. Likewise, women on birth control find different men attractive than women not on contraception. They are less apt to seek mates who are more genetically diverse—a common survival strategy for most species—in lieu of partners who are actually more genetically similar. Birth control pills may alter women’s ability to detect pheromones, thus rendering them incapable of distinguishing a suitable partner. This change in women’s preferences should be startling to women who use oral contraceptives. They may find themselves attracted to an individual when under the false veneer of hormonal contraception, but find themselves quite disinterested when they go off contraception in order to have children.
Realistically, contraception and the birth-control pill are enduring realities in the society in which today’s Christian parents raise their children. Thus, the question for Christian parents is not so much how to change society but how to change their relationship with their children. Our 17-year-old son is growing up in a world in which a significantly higher percentage of his peers are sexually active than previous generations (If you click on no other links, click on this one. Graph at top powerfully demonstrates my point). This change was especially dramatic with the advent of the birth-control pill. In the face of societal trends, school-based abstinence-only sexual education programs have been shown to be ineffective. NPR and CNN joyously announced the study results that reportedly denounce abstinence-only education (more to come on that in an upcoming “Mental Heath Desk” topic). The liberal media also downplayed the reality that teenage pregnancy declined at the same time that abstinence-only instruction was on the rise. The progressives fail to acknowledge that, like it or not, abstinence is now a real part of the dialogue on teenage sexuality. If nothing else—even if these school-based abstinence programs were completely ineffective—those of us who believe that children are capable of resisting their libidos have been heard. School-based efforts at teaching abstinence-only, especially in public schools, appear to be destined to fail for the vast majority of students. Teens require the backing of their parents before they will accept such instruction. Furthermore, though the schools may have been unable to reach the children, there is nothing comparable to a consistent relationship between a child and his or her parents, even in the teenage years. Thus, parents who have a consistent dialogue with their children regarding dating, relationships, marriage, values, emotions, and sex are likely to have a significant impact.
Recent events indicate that our 17-year-old son deserves an A+ in Abstinence-Only Instruction. Next year, as he goes off to college, where in most cases COED dorms are the norm, I dearly hope he remembers his lessons.
No, he is not a homosexual. But he does seem counter-cultural, particularly in how he approaches teenaged dating. Here’s his dilemma: A number of our son’s teenaged friends have told him lately that, if he just made a commitment, he could have a girlfriend. These young people—many from good, Christian families--have told him that he could have plenty of dates if he only chose a girlfriend first. Remarkably, he responded with a wisdom and maturity that I wish I had possessed at his age. He argued back to his peers that dating wasn’t supposed to work that way. He asserted that dating should come first, and if he found someone he really liked, he could pick a girlfriend. He also reasoned that, as he gets older, the narrowing down process will continue into engagement and someday probably marriage. Maybe he should bring this discussion up in his Statistics class. As a senior in high school, he’s looking forward to college and maybe graduate school. He’s in no hurry to select a mate.
Select a mate! That sounds so biological! Why is a blog dedicated to Christian families speaking about dating or courtship in such coarse, biological terms? The answer is simple. Mating or procreation is the goal and purpose of marriage. All the other stuff that moderns talk about—companionship, shared responsibilities, common goals, complimentary values—are important factors towards healthy relationships, but they mean nothing without biology. God endowed each human being with a biological drive, and even at that level of raw instinct, human beings tend to be remarkably selective. Call it magnetic attraction. Honestly, how frequently do a young man and a young woman really have magnetic attraction? One in a hundred, one in a thousand, one in ten thousand times?
Of course, these relatively rare moments of intersexual magnetism are not sufficient cause for mating and procreation. And human beings are capable of resisting these biological urges. Nonetheless, the existence and struggle with these impulses can be wonderfully instructive and enlightening for young people. In short, if God made them magnetically attracted to certain individuals, they should be aware of the attractions and the patterns they represent. Unbalanced, their impulses will lead them astray; absent of the propensities, their lives will lack motivation. A recent example that I heard on Christian radio is illustrative: A college freshman, reeling from a bad relationship, asked something like this: “Should I select my next partner in a relationship based on compatibility or chemistry?” The psychologist/minister guest didn’t have an answer on the spot. But the answer was obvious—both and more! You should choose your mate not just based upon compatibility or chemistry, but both and more including common values, goals, and beliefs. God gave young men and women brains to figure out the logic of compatibility, but also sexual urges to harness, drive, and motivate them. Just as it would be foolish to pursue a sexual attraction with an otherwise incompatible mate, it would also be folly to commit to a partner with whom one had no sexual magnetism.
A lot is written today about compatibility. For the most part, compatibility boils down to what I talked about in a previous blog—identity. Until a young person’s identity has begun to coalesce, that young person will be incapable of forming an intimate sexual relationship with another human being. Any entanglement between two immature individuals (i.e. without developed identities) can only result in the negation of each partner’s identity or the domination of one over the other. In other words, adolescents who attempt to engage in sexual intimacy will either experience their own budding identities dissolving into the quagmire or becoming subject to the domination of another. These are hardly the goals of liberalism or feminism, the very movements that espouse sexual freedom for adolescents! In other words, though a significant portion of today’s adolescents are sexually active, they are developmentally incapable of experiencing intimacy.
Today’s pandemic of sex without intimacy is made possible by one modern invention in particular—birth control. In today’s secular society, biology is something to be thwarted. The modern secular world is guilty of circumventing the natural, sexual biology of young people. Today’s non-Christian family (and, sadly, sometimes the Christian family) has a condom drawer in some discrete location for the children to use, no questions asked. Or the children simply procure prophylactics gratis from school or the health department. In a pinch, they’ll go to the drug store. Just as often, mothers cart their pubescent daughters off to the doctor or health department for birth-control pills or shots. This viewpoint seems fairly representative of the secular perspective on the topic. The net result of all this contraception is that young people are removed from an intimate awareness of their sexuality, particularly the feelings that are inherent to sexual attraction.
The behavioral disconnect occurs because sexual intercourse, now under the wavering thumb of contraception, ceases to have any expected consequence. Young people today feel free to experiment with their sexuality without regard to producing children and therefore without the need of the life-long commitment it takes to raise a child. Nonetheless, their instinctive yearning for fidelity and reliability remains, and they often find themselves irrationally jealous or possessive. Without any concrete reason for these inherent emotions, they repress their feelings and continue to behave in ways that only exacerbate theirs and their partners’ emotions. Some examples are promiscuity and serial monogamy. Without the palpable fear of childbirth, many young people lack the discernment to avoid fornication. They fail to connect sexuality to the profound emotional attachments it produces. They repress their awareness of their own human nature, pretending not to feel angry, jealous, or hurt when they or their partner moves on to the next bed-mate.
The casual attitude toward birth control may have biological consequences as well. Though human beings are capable of sexual intercourse outside of periods of fertility, the human species is nonetheless influenced by fertility. Though human men are capable of sex with a partner incapable of getting pregnant, they are instinctively most attracted to ovulating females. From this reasoning, it follows that sex with a woman who is on birth control (essentially feigning pregnancy and incapable of procreation) is likely to take on a completely different nature than sex between two fertile individuals. Likewise, women on birth control find different men attractive than women not on contraception. They are less apt to seek mates who are more genetically diverse—a common survival strategy for most species—in lieu of partners who are actually more genetically similar. Birth control pills may alter women’s ability to detect pheromones, thus rendering them incapable of distinguishing a suitable partner. This change in women’s preferences should be startling to women who use oral contraceptives. They may find themselves attracted to an individual when under the false veneer of hormonal contraception, but find themselves quite disinterested when they go off contraception in order to have children.
Realistically, contraception and the birth-control pill are enduring realities in the society in which today’s Christian parents raise their children. Thus, the question for Christian parents is not so much how to change society but how to change their relationship with their children. Our 17-year-old son is growing up in a world in which a significantly higher percentage of his peers are sexually active than previous generations (If you click on no other links, click on this one. Graph at top powerfully demonstrates my point). This change was especially dramatic with the advent of the birth-control pill. In the face of societal trends, school-based abstinence-only sexual education programs have been shown to be ineffective. NPR and CNN joyously announced the study results that reportedly denounce abstinence-only education (more to come on that in an upcoming “Mental Heath Desk” topic). The liberal media also downplayed the reality that teenage pregnancy declined at the same time that abstinence-only instruction was on the rise. The progressives fail to acknowledge that, like it or not, abstinence is now a real part of the dialogue on teenage sexuality. If nothing else—even if these school-based abstinence programs were completely ineffective—those of us who believe that children are capable of resisting their libidos have been heard. School-based efforts at teaching abstinence-only, especially in public schools, appear to be destined to fail for the vast majority of students. Teens require the backing of their parents before they will accept such instruction. Furthermore, though the schools may have been unable to reach the children, there is nothing comparable to a consistent relationship between a child and his or her parents, even in the teenage years. Thus, parents who have a consistent dialogue with their children regarding dating, relationships, marriage, values, emotions, and sex are likely to have a significant impact.
Recent events indicate that our 17-year-old son deserves an A+ in Abstinence-Only Instruction. Next year, as he goes off to college, where in most cases COED dorms are the norm, I dearly hope he remembers his lessons.
P.S. No, that is not my son getting cozy with Miley Cyrus in the photo above.
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