Author Warns Parents of Casual Sex Pitfalls Awaiting College Students
by Jim Brown
July 20, 2005
(AgapePress) - Dr. Jennifer Morse, a popular writer and speaker on family issues, says modern patterns of dating on college campuses are destructive when it comes to finding life-long married love.Morse has written a new book called Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World (Spence Publishing Company, 2005). In it, she warns parents who are sending a child to college this fall that most can expect casual sexual encounters, co-ed dorms, and even co-habitation to be part of their kids' lives for the next four years.
The author says hookups -- that is, encounters involving casual, recreational sex -- are not conducive to making a proper judgment about who will be one's lifelong partner. "If you start off with the idea that sex is a recreational activity with no moral or social significance," she asserts, "you're going to be drawn to the wrong persons, you're going to be doing the wrong kinds of things -- you're just not going to be in the right kind of mode for finding somebody with whom you can share life-long love."
At schools with co-ed dormitories and sometimes even co-ed rooming groups, it is not uncommon for students who live in close proximity to begin having sex. Again, Morse says this can be relationally damaging in the long term, as social science research has shown that couples living together before marriage are more likely to divorce than couples who do not co-habit before marriage.
According to Morse, the destructiveness of casual attitudes toward sex is born out when one looks at how college students behave in their dorms or elsewhere in extra-curricular campus life. For instance, she notes, the binge drinking phenomenon is closely related to the university campus hookup culture.
"People will go to a party thinking that they want to be sexual," the writer explains, "but they don't really want to take full responsibility for wanting to be sexual. So what they'll do is get themselves rip-roaring drunk and then have a sexual encounter and kind of not remember it the next day."
Morse says parents sending their children off to college this fall need to sit down with their kids and have a serious discussion about the hookup and binge drinking scene on campus so the young students will be prepared to confront it.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
