Outlines for Dating/Meeting & Sexuality Introductions

 

Dating/Meeting for Closeness (Supplement to Outlines on "lines" & Social Penetration)

 

1. Joshua Harris, 1997, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, gave up dating, too much like shopping for groceries. No date till find person to marry.

Reasons:

    1. Dating takes time & energy away from career.
    2. Dating does not necessarily lead to commitment but to recreational activity, including sex.
    3. It isolates couples leading to ruined friendships.
    4. It leads to artificial environment in which to evaluate others.
    5. It mistakes a physical relationship for love.
    6. It tends to skip the friendship stage of a relationship.

 

2. Whys of meeting for closeness?

    1. Desire for a CR, with all that involves.
    2. Desire for friendship, companionship, confidant.
    3. Desire for sex; procreation.

 

3. PA (Physical Attractiveness) effect—Candice Bergen’s "My looks grease the palm of life, but I resent that they’re so important in society. PA stereotype. PA matching in early meeting.

 

4. Readiness Issues

    1. Loneliness
    2. Grief (especially in aftermath of loss of a CR), "on rebound"

 

5. Theories of Courtship

    1. Stage models such as Murstein’s Stimulus-Value-Role
    2. Penn St. Couples Project—transitions from engaged to married to early marriage phases, including children, to sometimes divorce; gradual differentiation: periods of stability, growth, and decline (dialectic—Welwood’s ceaseless flow of separating & reuniting)

 

6. Is Cohabitation good for marriage? Closeness? 5 million cohabitating at various ages

Popenoe & Whitenoe 1999 study/argument against cohabiting value for marriage:

    1. Nothing to show leads to stronger marriage;
    2. Wrong to assume that you learn to be close by cohabiting;
    3. Longer people cohabit without marrying, more likely they will never marry;
    4. Cohabiting parents break up at a much higher rate than do married couples; same devastating emotional impacts on children.

 

7. Staying Single—decreased negative stereotype; growing number

 

Sexuality & Sexuality in CRs

1. Shirley MacLaine’s "Sex is hardly ever just about sex."

2. McKinney & Sprecher’s 1991 definition:

"Although this book is about erotic arousal and genital responses, it is also about a lot more. We use sexuality very generally to refer to sexual behaviors, arousal, and responses,as well as to sexual attitudes, desires, and communication" (p. 2).

3. On terms like: "Making Love" "Sleeping Together" relates to question of what is sex—with substantial percentage of college-age people indicating in 1999 survey that oral sex is not sex.

4. Kinsey’s pioneering role in development of study of human sexuality in 1940s & 1950s

5. Clark & Hatfield 1978 & 1982 Florida St. "Would you go to bed with me" studies

6. "Outercourse" City Hight The Little Hawk, Jan. 22, 1999:

"The notion that teenagers cannot ignore sexual urges is behind Outercourse. Definitions of Outercourse (sometimes referred to as ‘Almost Sex’ and ‘Everything But’) vary, but include sexual acts that do not involve penetration and transfer of bodily fluids. It is an alternative to abstinence that is considered more realistic for teens.

"Outercourse can include kissing, massaging, showering together, cuddling, mutual masturbation, and dry humping.

Some definitions include oral sex, but since there is the possibility of spreading disease, to be safe people need to use a condom or dental dam...

"Both males and females can achieve orgasm through outercourse, while feeling less guilt and regret, without risking pregnancy and exposure to a STD..."

7. Sexuality within a CR, Sprecher & McKinneygoals

Sex in a close relationship is...
    1. An act of self-disclosure
    2. An act of intimacy
    3. An act of affection or love
    4. An act of interdependence
    5. An act of maintenance
    6. An act of exchange

8. What accounts for most variance in how much sex couples have within marriage? Fatigue, work & children, simmering conflict that is unresolved.

9. Dana Densmoe’s logic re different female-male psychologies of sexuality within CRs:

"Intercourse, in the sense of the physical act... is not necessarily the thing we [women] are really longing for... Physically, there is a certain objective tension and release, at least for a man, when excitation proceeds to organism. With a woman even this physical issue is much less clear... The release we feel... therefore is psychological... We then enjoy the pleasures of closeness"

 

Different Male-Female Sexual Fantasies:

1. Men fantasize a greater variety of sexual encounters with different partners than do women.

2. Men are more likely to switch from one sexual fantasy to another in the same fantasy than are women.

3. Men are more likely to have sexual fantasies more frequently than are women.

4. Men are more likely to fantasize about someone with whom they want only to have sex than are women.

5. Men's sexual fantasies focus primarily on visual images.

6. Women's sexual fantasies emphasize touching, feelings, and partner response than do men's.

7. Women are more likely than men to fantasize about someone with whom they wanted to become romantically involved.

8. Men's sexual fantasies move more quickly to explicit sexual activity than do women's.

9. Women's fantasies involve a slower buildup to sexual culmination than do men's.

10. Women have a clearer image than men of their imagined partners' facial features.

11. Men have a clearer image than women of their genital features of their imagined partners.

Letter by anonymous mother to her son away at college, 1984

"Sex. For lack of a better word, I call this section 'sex.'

I dislike the word. It is so harsh and impersonal and animalistic. But 'intercourse' is not adequate; it denotes only a small part of the sexuality between husband and wife...

"Married sex is much less important than most young people in the first throes of romantic love think it to be. It is something you do sometimes because you want children, but most of the time because it feels good, or because the situation seems to demand it, or because your partner expects it. But sex is not just something you do, it is something you are--male and female--alike in many ways but different in crucial aspects.

"There is a cliche that women make love when things are right and men make love to make things right. The problems bred by that small difference are immeasurable. I recall the many nights I would go to bed, exhausted from a sixteen-hour day of physical work, resentful that I had gotten little or no help, dehumanized by a day or many days with no adult interaction, or conversation and as we crawled into bed, I would think, if he tries to make love, I'll scream.

"But that dear man, unaware of the anger I was feeling or perhaps feeling guilty for his lack of attention or help, would respond as men tend to respond by reaching over and trying to make things right by making love. And I, out of some sense of duty, or simply not wanting to hurt his feelings, would acquiesce, even managing to act as if I enjoyed it, but inside hostility would be brimming over.

"Talking to young wives, especially mothers, I have found this to be a common complaint and the source of great marital discord. Women want and need to be tenderly courted.

Make a promise to yourself now that you will never initiate love-making with Patty if you haven't first spent time in real conversation with her--listening to her problems and pain, taking her feelings seriously...

"But it takes time and experience and perhaps luck to sense those moments and respond. I read once that it takes a couple an average of two years to achieve sexual adjustment. I don't know what that means. Sexual adjustment is not something you achieve and then possess forever after. Each act is a new experience, a new challenge..."

 

John Rosemond, March 1993, Hemispheres magazine

A father and child psychologist, John Rosemond writing in the March, 1993, magazine Hemispheres, discussed his approach to raising his young son with certain inclinations about sexuality, relationships, and women.

He suggested that his socialization plan was to try to educate his son not with a "hit and run" approach to sex, as had been the pattern of his own parents, but rather with an ongoing commitment to openness in discussion and recognition that is regularly modeled in adult-adult and adult-child dialogue. Greater openness between children and parents about sexuality and relationships should contribute to the young person's implementation of his or her relationships with greater dignity and respect of self and of all those involved when a sexual relationship begins.