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What's the best way to encourage people to save sex for the covenant of marriage? Mark Regnerus, author of Forbidden Fruit, Richard Ross, co-founder of True Love Waits, and Donna Freitas, author of Sex and the Soul suggest the best way to help.

My initial response to the question—and I'm not being facetious—is the following: Stop talking about marriage when you talk about saving sex.

Over the past year and a half, I have been giving lectures and workshops at colleges and universities in response to a national study I conducted on sexual decision-making and students' attitudes toward sex as they relate to students' religious and spiritual commitments. I talk about hookup culture a lot because it has become the norm just about everywhere you go (save at Christian colleges). Oddly enough, hookup culture seems to send many students into a period of spiritual seeking, drawing them closer to faith and to God.

Living in the context of hookup culture over an extended period of time tends to throw students into a life crisis. Most students experience hookups as self-emptying, exhausting, and unpleasant, making those involved feel ambivalent about sex. As a result, the average college student is eager to find a way out of the culture.

This is when talk about abstinence becomes interesting, even exciting, on just about every college campus I've visited.

Offering students a variety of ways to think about not having sex or taking a break from having sex—for a night, for a weekend, for a month, for a semester, essentially trying on abstinence for a period of time—turns on a light switch for many students.

Deciding not to hook up becomes a revolutionary one-night stand of sorts—just not the kind that students are used to, which makes it all the more attractive. Most students are shocked to think you can try out abstinence just like you can try out hooking up.

Most people understand abstinence as a several-years-long commitment, perhaps even a several-decades-long one for young adults, and present it as such. If you present a student, already overwhelmed by living in hookup culture, with what sounds like another overwhelming framework for having sex (or not having it), you won't get very far, at least not with too many of them. They are already living in one impossible situation—offer them what sounds like another impossible situation, and they are likely to keep treading water where they are. And where they are is hookup culture.

The unpleasant, unfulfilling realities of hookup culture have made abstinence more attractive. But tying a discussion about abstinence to marriage, in my opinion, is a pedagogical mistake. Most students need help in seeing their way out of hookup culture for this coming weekend, never mind being asked to see years beyond graduation to the second half of their 20s, when the average college graduate is likely to marry.

There is so much talk about sexual experimentation during the college years. Choosing abstinence is a kind of sexual experimentation. We just don't often discuss it in such terms. But college students love the idea, and, once they have thought about it for a while, are often eager to experiment with it.

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Donna Freitas is a visiting scholar of religion at Boston University and author of Sex and the Soul. Mark Regnerus and Richard Ross also suggested the best way to help.

Previous Village Green sections have discussed aid to foreign nations, technology and abortion.

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January 2010, Vol. 54, No. 1

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