Are young women forsaking love for sex?

[Polly]

Depressing. Not that I'm against sex before marriage (my religion doesn't prohibit it) but I worry about the implicit trust issue.

Here's the link http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/13/AR2007021301371.html

Polly

[Lori]

Eh, I'm wary of any sort of generalization of that sort. I get students writing about love all the freaking time, even when I really could care less about their love life or find it relevant to the assignment. I think it's very easy to extrapolate trends from isolated samples, but they probably don't apply very far outside that sample.

I also find it troubling that it's seen as a problem when women aren't interested in relationships at a younger age, but not when men aren't. Women are "supposed" to be the ones who want commitment, and men are the ones who are "supposed" to want to run away from it, and then the woman finally wears him down and he gives in and they commit. Nobody has ever had much problem with men being wary of commitment, so I'm not sure why it is newsworthy when a small group of college women are.

I do think there are a few things going on that would just make it reasonable for young women to not be in such a hurry to rush into a commitment. When a woman assumes that she's going to need her husband to support her, then obviously she's going to want to get married as soon as possible, so that she can be supported. But, if she isn't going to be relying on marriage for economic well-being, then she doesn't have to try to hook the first man she finds. She can be a little more picky. And, our society completely discourages people in their early twenties--particulary when they are college-educated and middle-class--from getting married and having children. Thirty years ago, if you graduated college at 22 you could find a good job with security, an affordable house, and be in a position where marrying and starting a family was economically feasible. Today, you'll be lucky if you can find a job with benefits before you're 30, and homes are so expensive in many parts of the country that owning a home by 40 seems like a realistic goal.

I think sometimes we blame young people for "delaying" adulthood, when the economic opportunities for entering into "adulthood" as it has been kind of culturally defined are simply not there anymore for many, many young people. But sex is a natural desire, and we can't expect that we're going to be the first generation in all of human history where people routinely waited until their early 30s to have sex. The answer, if we think there's a problem, is to make conditions more favorable for people to raise families, buy homes, and be economically independent earlier, so they can marry earlier without it being a huge burden, rather than expecting people to hold off on the very natural desire to have sex as we keep pushing the marriage age farther and farther back.

I do think that it is preferable to save physically intimacy for relationships that are equally emotionally intimate, but I don't think it's like these young women are just making choices out of thin air. I think we often overestimate the effect things like the media have on people and really underestimate the effect economic circumstances have on them.

[Beka]

yep- what Lori said, i think it's very simple- women now have other ambitions aside from grow up, meet mr right, have his babies and settle down (although my life following that pattern i did have significant options for it not to which my mothers generation didn't have unless coming from the upper classes) but the desire for a sex life is still there and for many women a no strings attached approach is the best way to keep an already complicated life as simple as possible.

I do worry about lack of self esteem having an effect on young women and how they chose to conduct their sex and love lives but the fact is many of these women chosing to have a casual sex life that would have shocked previous generations are powerful sucessful women.

I also agree it is very easy to take one small sample and generalize making the study and it's finding unrespresentative of a true picture.

[Erika]

Honestly, if adult women want to go out and have tons of sex for pure pleasures sake, as long as they are being careful about it, then more power to them. I found the whole tone of the article depressingly old-fashioned and almost chauvanistic. Women now have so many opportunitues open to them that why shouldn't they put career before love, marriage and children, if they want to?

And I do think that there won't be a sudden drop off in marraige and romance.