Dear Reader,
Do you remember when we used to refer to sexual activities as bases? And how going “all the way” was the final base of them all. Well times have changed and we’ve just added another base.
We went from holding your hand as a prereq for 1st base but it seems that now that prereq has become the final test. Melanie Boyd, an assistant dean of student affairs at Yale led a freshman orientation workshop on intimacy. To her surprise, several of the young men stated that they found holding hands is more intimate than receiving a hand job (or any given sexual activity in this case). And to my surprise, according to my Instagram poll:
55% of you said that you find hand holding to be more intimate than sex. The big question here is why do we feel there is a higher level of intimacy that comes with holding someone’s hand over sleeping with them?
I initially responded to this question believing that sex is the more intimate act. I’m someone that would prefer an emotional connection in order to begin a hookup. This might have to do with either being raised in a Christian family or that most of the time I equate sex with relationships because I tend to date more than the average person that I know. I always tied together the idea of dating & sex because I believed in dating someone one for the purpose of finding a lifetime partner. Now you have to understand that because of these two circumstances the hand holding usually came first for me. I worked in a way so that I would get to know someone before letting them see me in what was my idea of a vulnerable state. Now, this isn’t everyone’s idea of a vulnerable state which is why 55% of you said that holding hands takes more time to get comfortable with.
Given that I know a majority of you who responded to the poll, I found that most of you who voted sex were either currently in a relationship or more often than others have had experiences with boyfriends and girlfriends. For those of you who voted hand holding I found that you currently did not have a partner, have never had a partner, or the big one is that you guys are more comfortably open with hookup culture. Obviously there are a number of different factors that go into your decision and this is just a general observation I’ve made but what I really want to take from this is why & since when has hand holding become a heavily intimate act?
I can’t pinpoint exactly where we became more comfortable with sexuality but there’s a theory that with the industrial revolution pushing more people together, there became more densely populated neighborhoods where attitudes towards sex became more liberal. The “liberalization of sexuality” probably started rolling in around the 1960s when birth control came about. Now it’s definitely still a taboo in some areas of the world but oftentimes I’m finding that sex no longer really carries this stigma of virginity, only for procreation, or being a sin. It’s great how progressive we’ve been with becoming comfortable with our sexuality. We’re starting to experience more college culture, dating apps, an increase of courses within schools, podcasts/books/movies, etc. They’re all pushing to normalize this way of expression and how it’s something to be celebrated rather than hidden. But at the same time, college culture and dating apps have prominently become a ground for mostly hookups, which means less encouragement for dating and relationships.
So why are we not dating as much? What killed our hope to commit to settling down?
🍒 We’re young. It made sense back then because they got married young. But how many adults NOW have told you “you’re so young, you have so much ahead of you.” It makes sense that people use their young years to explore sexuality more than the intimacy of dating
🍒 Dating apps promote hooking up, I don’t think it’s intentional but I can tell you I know more people who used it for hooking up rather than finding their soulmate.
🍒 We don’t want to go through a divorce. “According to WeVorce, a legal technology company specializing in divorce mediation, published a study in 2017 that found that 80% of couples are headed in the direction of divorce within their first four to five years of marriage and 50% of all children in North America will experience parental divorce before the age of 18.”
I think we ask so many questions about what love is and if we know when we’ve experienced it. We have trouble distinguishing love from lust, so the easier route to avoid getting your heart broken by love is to give in to that lust. It’s easier for us to save our hearts by sleeping with someone once or twice than it is to put your feelings of interest on display. I think hand-holding makes it real which raises the idea of having something/someone and having to go through losing it. But when something doesn’t actually have an attachment to you it’s not really losing it, is it? So we avoid the intimacy of hand-holding in order to save ourselves from a world of let downs and heartbreak. The moment we hold hands is the moment that things could potentially work out and then potentially fall apart.
Sincerely,
K