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New-age relationships complicate love |
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Tuesday, 17 October 2006 |
by Lindsay TIGAR
Intern Lifestyles Reporter
The lyrics of Seth Swirsky’s song “Instant Pleasure” as performed by Rufus Wainwright sound loud and clear on Appalachian’s campus, “I don’t want someone to love me, just give me sex whenever I want it, ‘cause all I ask for is instant pleasure.”
Have college students become more concerned with instant pleasure than a meaningful relationship?
It seems the words “sex” or “hook-up” don’t coincide with the famous
four-letter word love anymore. So maybe the new “relationship” of
today’s generation is “friends-with-benefits.”
“I think that love and commitment should be part of a relationship
before sex comes into the picture,” Madeline Gordon, a freshmen
psychology major said. “I don’t think it’s right for people to go
around randomly hooking-up.”
A friends-with-benefits relationship could be defined as a special type
of friendship between two people where sex is involved but commitment
is not. Or in college terms, the person you call up when you’re feeling
lonely.
However, random hook-ups are common on college campuses.
According to www.divorcepeers.com, 49 percent of college students have had a sexual hook-up and never saw their partner again.
Often times in this type of relationship, one person gets attached,
though commitment is not supposed to be present. And most of the time,
the female gets the wrong end of the bargain.
“There are gender differences on how much emotional commitment there is
in sexual encounters,” Doris Bazzini, psychology department general
experimental program director, said. “Males are able to separate
emotional commitments and females prefer that sexual partner is someone
they have an emotional connection with.”
Thus, if a female establishes this connection within a
“friends-with-benefits” relationship and she isn’t received on those
feelings by her male counterpart, it ends with heartache. And for the
guy, he successfully had and ended another typical college relationship.
Even if a female decides she wants to participate in a
friends-with-benefits relationship and ignores her desire for an
“emotional connection,” will other males view her as unworthy
girlfriend material because of her past behaviors?
“Society promotes labels on genders,” Bazzini said. “Traditionally, if
a woman sleeps around, she gets a bad reputation. On the other hand,
guys have been encouraged and even rewarded for having multiple sex
partners.”
People should realize that although waiting until marriage for sexual
intercourse may be outdated, waiting on a meaningful relationship is
not.
Most of the time, having a friends-with-benefits relationship does not climax (no pun intended) into anything beneficial.
Some may argue that their friends-with-benefits relationship was
meaningful, but truthfully the only significant aspect was between the
sheets.
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