A Sad Phenomenon
Laura Sessions Stepp, one of the most acute observers of relationships between the sexes (especially when it comes to young people), has a sad but intriguing piece in today's Washington Post about the unwillingness of young women to fall in love.
Absent old-fashioned dating, which has virtually disappeared, the alternative for these young women is hooking up, which can happen in any semi-private place and includes anything from kissing to intercourse. The beauty of hooking up is that it carries no commitment, and this is huge, for being emotionally dependent on a lover is what scares these young women the most.
To tell a man "I need you" is like saying "I'm incomplete without you." A young man might say that and sound affectionate. But to an ambitious young woman, who has been taught to define power on her terms and defend it against all comers, need signals weakness.
The sad thing, of course, is that these young women have been sold a bill of goods. Loving someone -- really loving someone the right way -- has nothing to do with "incompleteness" . . . it has to do with wanting to share that completeness with someone else. It's an essentially selfless act.
What's more, the substitute they've been offered -- sex without commitment or emotion -- is a joke, and the "solution" least likely to meet their truest and deepest needs. Ironic that the "feminist" approach to love and romance (i.e. substituting them with what's effectively a transactional approach to sex) works incredibly well for men (at least, those of the less evolved variety) and considerably less well for women.
Absent old-fashioned dating, which has virtually disappeared, the alternative for these young women is hooking up, which can happen in any semi-private place and includes anything from kissing to intercourse. The beauty of hooking up is that it carries no commitment, and this is huge, for being emotionally dependent on a lover is what scares these young women the most.
To tell a man "I need you" is like saying "I'm incomplete without you." A young man might say that and sound affectionate. But to an ambitious young woman, who has been taught to define power on her terms and defend it against all comers, need signals weakness.
The sad thing, of course, is that these young women have been sold a bill of goods. Loving someone -- really loving someone the right way -- has nothing to do with "incompleteness" . . . it has to do with wanting to share that completeness with someone else. It's an essentially selfless act.
What's more, the substitute they've been offered -- sex without commitment or emotion -- is a joke, and the "solution" least likely to meet their truest and deepest needs. Ironic that the "feminist" approach to love and romance (i.e. substituting them with what's effectively a transactional approach to sex) works incredibly well for men (at least, those of the less evolved variety) and considerably less well for women.
posted by LadybugUSA at 1:40 PM
2 Comments:
Well, my little Valentine,
I prefer to think of it this way:
For most of us, that is, almost all of us, to find that perfect match from the ranks of the opposite sex completes us. When we have truly found that special someone, from the ranks of the opposite sex, each completes the other since the two become one. That's not to say that anyone NEEDS the other to survive. NEED is just a romantic notion, but NEED is inferior to DESIRE or CHOICE. To CHOOSE to spend the rest of one's life with someone, from the ranks of the opposite sex, and to have the somone CHOOSE the one, is what it's all about.
Happy Valentine's Day!
What a quaint notion!
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