Journal 2 — Nuptial Mystery

The results of Donna Freitas book fit right in with Zygmunt Bauman’s view of modernity as being obsessed with transience and not being tied down, which in turn is a result of individualism. The hook-up culture that Freitas describes is totally focused on the self and constantly moving to “better pastures” in terms of partners. In the end, a hook-up is just about increasing one’s status in the eyes of one’s peers and perhaps having a moment of pleasure. If you start caring about the other person at all, you lose the game. Sex is no longer gift, no longer in the context of commitment, and entirely divorced from procreation and family. Bauman would probably also point to rampant cohabitation as being a result of the hook-up culture on college campuses. “[T]he old-style ‘till death us do part’ marriage, already elbowed out by the self-admittedly temporary ‘we will see how it works’ cohabitation, is replaced by a part-time, flexible-times ‘comings together’.” Those ‘comings together’ sound exactly like the hook-up culture.

The sacrifice, however, is steep, because we were not made for such transience but for permanence, and in our hearts we long to give ourselves in permanent gift. This permanent gift in the context of love is achieved in marriage. In marriage, spouses become “kin” — there is no longer choice involved, and, in order for it to work, the focus must cease being oneself. Keeping love alive requires constant work. “Establishing a bond of affinity proclaims the intention of making the bond like that of kinship — but also the readiness to pay the price of the avatar in the hard currency of day-in, day-out drudgery” (29). This sort of love is an antidote to the liquid modernity that surrounds us, and the true antidote for the hook-up culture. Freitas suggestion that “good sex” and self-examination of what that might mean for each individual is only a bare beginning to an answer and in the end rather individualistic. It reduces the question of love to sex, while Bauman wants to say that the anti-dote to something like the hook-up culture is actually the fidelity found in marriage. Romantic love may be just as transient as liquid modernity, but the life-long commitment of marriage elevates love to something that is not fleeting and that is also not out of our control — we may “fall in love” but in marriage we choose to stay in that love. Sex in the context of that love thus gains meaning — it becomes self-gift and not just individualistic self-promotion.