Campus nights on any given week can be a miserable experience for young men and women who have come to feel like hooking up is not just a fact of life but expectation and maybe even best hope. That’s, of course, dangerous nonsense. As part of their effort to help, the Love and Fidelity network has taken Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to encourage the casual date on campus. You know: the get-to-know-someone, see-if-there-might-be-a-future-there, give-it-some-time kind of thing. Caitlin La Ruffa, director of the Love and Fidelity Network, talks with me about #BringingDatingBack.
Q: Do young men and women on campus today really see hooking up as a “chore,” as your press release puts it? It’s not exactly doing the dishes.
A: That’s true. It’s not doing the dishes. But it is a chore in the sense that it’s something people feel obligated to do as part of the course of college life, whether or not they’ve even thought about if they really want to. In her research in interviews with hundreds of college students over the last decade, Donna Freitas, author of Sex and the Soul and The End of Sex, has found that student responses to hooking-up range from unhappy to “whatever” to “fine.” Strikingly, no one actually seems to have much positive to say beyond “fine,” which frankly isn’t that much more enthusiastic than “whatever,” is it? Freitas had a hard time finding anyone who could really talk about a “great” hook-up for both people involved. Sounds a bit like a chore, no? Doing the dishes can be awful, whatever, or not that big a deal, but no one ever talks about what a fabulous time they had washing dishes – and evidently the same is true when it comes to hooking up.
Q: Is a casual date really something college students need to be encouraged to do? It seems simple enough.
A: Looks can be deceiving! Kerry Cronin, Boston College professor and famed “Dating Doctor” gave a wonderful talk at our last conference in Princeton in which she related discovering that no one dates on college campuses. And because there’s no social script for it, no one knows how. People have serious, intense relationships, they hook-up, and they hang out, but no one dates. As Donna Freitas has observed, one of the primary rules of the hook-up culture is that there needs to be minimal communication and you can’t care. Basically, whoever cares least, wins. This approach to relationships has actually carried over into the “hanging out” crowd as well, but making intentions and interest as vague as possible makes absolutely no sense if what you want in the end is to find someone to love and be loved by. With dating – even asking someone to grab some frozen yogurt with you – you have to make the fact that you’re even a little bit romantically interested clear. That can be a scary thing to do when it goes against campus social mores. But the secret is that most college students actually would like there to be more of this kind of dating as part of the social scene.
Q: Do they need guides on what to do and what not to do on said date?
A: Yes! After the conference we had a chance to chat with many of the students who had heard Kerry Cronin’s talk. These were students with a rich understanding of human love and sincere desires for a healthy and happy marriage and family life in the future, I might add. But when asked whether they were going to go through with Kerry Cronin’s “assignment” to ask someone out on a date, all you could see were deer in headlights. With no social script for the casual dating, asking someone out on a date (even for a quick coffee) is seen as the college equivalent of a marriage proposal. So, that’s a enough pressure to make anyone feel awkward and uncomfortable. Deep down, I think people do know how to be courteous, show an appropriate level of interest, and find interesting topics for conversation – but what they need is a little confidence and a gentle nudge to overcome the challenge of doing this very counter-culture thing of asking someone to go for a burger.
Q: There’s been so much “rape culture” talk about campus life of late. Is your effort a reframing of conversations involving campus life?
A: I hope the heightened profile of a very real and very serious problem will become a catalyst for finding real solutions, but so far we haven’t seen that. It’s very difficult to make progress against campus sexual assault when nothing is being done to address a culture where the most influential norms surrounding sex and romance are not communicating and not caring. Unfortunately we have yet to see a willingness among those whose noble goal is to eradicate campus assault to make the connection between a culture that both puts pressure on participating in casual sex normalizes a lack of care and communication and the prevalence of sexual assault on campus. Until we address the underlying culture that severs sex from love, our efforts to solve the rape crisis won’t go far enough.
Q: Campus life is sounding a little miserable here. What’s your pitch to anyone who wouldn’t want to make a Valentine’s Day date as it might imply a relationship commitment beyond what they’ intend?
A: No need to ask someone out for the first time on Valentine’s Day — the how-to’s in our posters are meant to work year-round. None of them even reference the holiday specifically. If you’d rather wait a couple of weeks until the Valentine’s Day pressure is off, by all means! Just don’t let weeks turn into months and into an excuse never to put yourself out there.
Q: “For too many students, Valentine’s Day on campus means being bombarded with messages that distort one’s understanding of love and the best ways for relationships to develop?” Are we talking about the Vagina Monologues?
A: That’s one example. Many schools have “Sex Week” around this time that feature porn screenings and workshops designed to help students explore a variety of fetishes and sexual practices. Student groups have “condomgram” sales where they’ll deliver a condom from a secret admirer to your dorm. (How charming.) Basically, the holiday focuses almost exclusively on the mechanics of sex – as if that is the most important feature of a loving romantic relationship – and has nothing to do with actual romance, love, or relationships.
Q: Why does Fifty Shades of Grey bother you?
A: Where to start? Let’s just say it glamorizes violence against women and conflates abuse with intimacy. Those are things none of us should be a fan of. I’d encourage anyone looking for more information to check out Dr. Miriam Grossman’s blog series on the subject.
Q: Love and Fidelity points to traditional marriage. What do you say to a student who worries he is on the wrong side of history as same-sex marriage is in the news again this week?
A: No matter what the courts or culture may try to tell us, we need to continue to witness to the truth about marriage: that men and women are distinct and complementary, that it takes a man and a woman to bring a child into the world, and that children deserve a chance to grow up with a mom and a dad. There are generations of kids counting on us to defend that right.
As Ryan Anderson recently reminded us, too many of our neighbors haven’t heard our arguments, and they seem unwilling to respect our rights because they don’t understand what we believe. It’s up to us to change that perception. We will help decide which side history is on.
Q: What is it about love and fidelity that you see college students responding to?
A: College students – like all of us – long to love and be loved. The hook-up culture is far from novel anymore, and students are beginning to see that it doesn’t keep its promises. Students want more than what it offers. They want authentic love, and they hope for happy marriages in the future. More and more they are recognizing that the “me”-centric ethic of campus romantic life just isn’t going to prepare them for what they know they ultimately desire.
Q: What do you know now that you didn’t know in college that you wish you could impart to every college student feeling obligated to participate in the hook-up scene?
A: Not everyone’s doing it – even if you can’t see from the middle of the quad how that could possible be true. And, as Donna Freitas observed in her research, very few people are actually happy with the limited romantic options of hooking-up or nothing. They might not admit it in public, but deep down at best people are fine with it – and at worst they’re in tremendous pain and don’t understand why when it seems that their peers are thriving in a hook-up-centered social environment. In reality, most long for more options and would be delighted to find themselves on a simple date. (So don’t be afraid to ask!)
UPDATE: Apologies for initially having the wrong hashtag on this post.