H FOR HOOKING UP

Have you heard of it? It is a very popular practice among young people in the United States. Literally, it means ‘hooking up’. It consists of meeting, having sex without emotional or affective involvement, and then breaking up as quickly as you met. It usually involves oral sex, which is rarely satisfying for girls, but accepted by them. A relationship consummated without the effort of the relationship and without the burden of responsibility.

Sex without love

It was normal to think that sex was the language of love and was intimately linked to the life event. But what happens today? What one can immediately say is that it is the bitter fruit of fear: after all, one has sex without love because one is afraid to love, and one is afraid to love because love makes one suffer, exposes one to suffering: better to fall back on immediate pleasure.

Psychologists have already raised the alarm cry: there is a worrying drop in desire in sexual experience today. Little wonder: it is the bitter fruit of the yielding to the two dogmas of our time, that of optimising enjoyment and that of avoiding all pain. A condition of immediate and protected well-being that we barely allow to infants: from infantile colic to maternal ragadas, all the way to weaning from the mother, everything leads us to believe that immediate enjoyment is certainly not the ideal to be sought, if anything it is the delirium to be avoided.

Man is truly human when he goes beyond the horizon of satisfying needs and enters into that of recognising persons, when he moves from attachment to the mother's breast to recognition of the mother's face! Human love matures in the passage from narcissistic love to oblative love, from loving the other for me, to loving the other for oneself!

Sex reduced to pleasure

The attempt to undermine the family basis of love and life manifests its ultimately diabolical face in its effects of abstraction, confusion and division. Not for nothing does Scripture say that the Evil One is ‘lying’ and ‘murderous’, and, in particular, it says that the Antichrist is he who ‘denies God in the flesh’ and he who ‘denies the Father and the Son’. That is to say: since authentic love is concrete, any false love will seek to deny the truth of bodies and bonds.

Think of the figures of love promoted in the past two centuries: we have gone from romantic love, typically disembodied, to erotic love, typically carnal. With a twofold confusing effect: the promotion of disembodied love has attenuated sensitivity to the difference of the sexes, while the promotion of carnal love has weakened eroticism, whose sap is desire. Once sexuality has been denied and eroticism has fallen, space remains only for the pursuit of pleasure as an end in itself, which consigns human love to the drifts of meaninglessness and violence.

The grammar of the sexes and the syntax of the family

Now, fast and irresponsible sex is not good for anyone: not for women, who enjoy physical intimacy above all when it is experienced within a meaningful love relationship; not for men, whose sexual desire, being rather oriented towards the act itself than the relationship, requires a difficult journey of maturation. Indeed, early sex, purely pleasure-oriented, leaves deep wounds in girls' souls and consigns boys to degrading sex slavery, whose industry has never been so flourishing. The point then is to rediscover and deepen a wise knowledge of man and woman, which today is either silenced or falsified. T. Cantelmi: "the desire of girls is as far as it can be from the hooking up experience, and often, although they know very well what it is and what it entails, they do not fail to form expectations of a relationship which are often disappointed, with deep suffering. Few girls really understand that the experience of young males with respect to sexuality is different, and that the way teenagers experience and deal with physical intimacy today feeds the worst kind of male sexuality”.

With all this, one should not be discouraged. The persuasiveness of true love continually rises even from its ashes. P. Ricoeur, one of the greatest contemporary philosophers, has rightly observed that, in spite of attempts to disqualify the family through the promotion of free love, marriage is still a winner today, and ultimately “remains the best occasion for tenderness”, since it holds together the erotic instant and the duration of the bond, reconciles spontaneity and responsibility, harmonises desire and law, and achieves the miracle of making pleasure and love, man and woman, one!

Fr. Roberto Carelli SDB

(Fonte: Roberto Carelli – Alfabeto Famigliare)