Young people are having less sex

JHS
Mon, 03 Dec 2018 16:50:18 +0000

I read the Atlantic article with a lot of interest.

My kids seem to have dodged the bullet somewhat. (In terms of relationships. I have no idea – and don’t really want any idea – how that translates into sex frequency.) Both got married within the last year and a half, one to a college friend (although their official romantic involvement didn’t begin until almost two years after their graduation), and the other to a person met through a mass-market online dating site when the couple were both about 27.

I had a couple of thoughts reading the piece. First, college and graduate school are still places where lots of people find romantic partners, but I think there is a fair amount of social pressure now on students not to couple up, for fear that it will distract them from their studies and interfere with establishing their brilliant careers. And that’s right: Romantic involvement, successful or not, requires energy, time, and compromises, all of which may affect the achievement of other goals. If you get absolutist about it – nothing should get in the way of X! – then there’s little or no hope for real romantic engagement. And increasingly, I think young adults get the message that they ought to be absolutist about their careers, at least until that mythical point when they are “established.”

Second (and related): Meeting people on an uncurated basis is a huge, huge time suck. Getting to know people better when you already know them some and know your shared interests (and maybe shared attraction) takes a ton of time. Starting at 0, or close to it, which is essentially where you are with even the best dating services, represents a geometric (if not exponential) increase in the time and effort it takes to get to the point where you can start thinking about the really important choices. Once upon a time, I asked my daughter how she would go about meeting people if she were looking for a potential romantic involvement. (It turned out at the time she was already involved with her future spouse, but she hadn’t chosen to let me in on that bit of information yet.) She said, “With the online services, given my age and where I live [Brooklyn], the only limit on meeting basically appropriate people is the amount of time I am willing to devote to it. But it takes an incredible amount of time, and it can get really exhausting.” Each actual date represents hours and hours of “work” in a short time-frame, both to set it up and to do it, and it can take quite a few dates to identify someone with whom it makes sense even to think about having a relationship. The more traditional ways of meeting people all function as shortcuts to that process.