How the flames go out
Jack Daly
Class of 2025
(2/2022) When people think of the pitfalls of the love between the sexes, they might be inclined to envision something like Paolo and Francesca, two medieval lovers punished forever among the ranks of the lustful for their excessive passion in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. However, the time of Divine Comedy is long past and modern days require modern vices, in addition to those already widespread. Perhaps the largest distinction to be found within the old and new kinds of chastity is that while Paolo and Francesca were carried away on the mighty winds of passion, the younger generation seems subject to winds that are far more sporadic.
Throughout most of history, some noticeable degree of lust was seen as if healthy, or simply the status quo among young people, particularly among young men. An appetite for love was thought to be part of a youthful zeal for life; for better or worse, it was part of maturation. Any worries about the excesses of adolescence were often assuaged by the assumption that these tendencies would abate, and untutored cads would become upstanding members of society.
Within the last century, or likely even longer, the old standards often taken for granted suddenly came into question, and the spirit of licentiousness ruled the ensuing age. Attitudes were changed, priorities shifted, and change after change occurred. The Sexual Revolution of the sixties is typically blamed for the sea of change, but there had been eras of loose morals foreshadowing it for quite some time. What is unique about the last fifty years is how effectively any reaction against the current times is dismissed as backwards.
Today what is expected, or indeed considered healthy, among the younger generations would have been unmentionable in polite society not so long ago. In fact, such conduct is widely seen as rather mundane; it is only the previously unimaginable deviations that garner any attention or excitement within the fashionable set. It seems as though the most celebrated love stories of the day are not what people do or feel in love, but rather who can be in love with whom.
Before any aged hippies sit back and bask in the victory of ‘free love,’ it must be pointed out that the only thing these changes have really accomplished is the reduction of human sexuality to purely materialistic terms. Beautiful concepts, such as ‘true love,’ an idea which seems to have been simultaneously ridiculed and praised for centuries, are all but erased; everyone is not only allowed but required to construct their own definition of love or be left with none at all. It is chaos.
The excesses of modernity would be disordered enough, but recently there has developed a new and unforeseen turn of the screw. In the past couple of years, there has been report after report about how young people in first world countries are becoming less sexually active. This obviously can’t be attributed to any religious revival; rather it would seem that the free love plot has played itself out. Excitement and pleasure are fleeting things, and any promise to hold onto them forever in our earthly life has shown itself to be totally empty.
If chastity can be defined as a healthy respect for one’s body and those of others, then departures from that virtue can be identified as both the desire to use oneself in excess and the wish to reject one’s body entirely. As with all cases of vice, there is a certain bipolar quality, two extremes between which lost souls swing.
In our lost culture, people are left always chasing the highest highs and falling to the lowest lows. Moments of intensity give way to feelings of shame and self-disgust, feelings that we have lost any way to process. Most people try to bury these emotions in more indulgence. Many succeed in dismissing them, but plenty others are swallowed by them. These emotions eat away at one’s subconscious until their hosts feel uncomfortable in their own skin. At some level, those afflicted by this guilt from the back of their minds have come to hate their bodies. They view themselves not as wonderfully and fearfully made, but as minds trapped in a fleshy prison, an inconvenient weight that connects them to little more than pain and hunger.
Gone is the time of devotion and service, of wild romance and the giving of oneself. The story of today is that of the ever oscillating cycle that moves always from pleasure to despair and back again. Love reduced merely to the physical has lost all of its grandeur, and desire has lost any element of longing. It is now no more than an itch to scratch until it bleeds.
It is often said that youth and ignorance are synonymous. People tend look at young adulthood as a time of discovery, where mistakes are guaranteed to be made. At the same time, it is a shameful mistake if today’s generation spends its best days scoffing at the passionate love that ought to be its greatest treasure. The realm of romance is very much in need of a renaissance, and a new healthy attitude with a holistic view of love and sex.
Such a pillar of human life should not be allowed to go on so misshapen. While it can never be assured that humans will behave perfectly, it is important that people, on an individual level, correct how they are living, as that is the only surefire way for them to ever see any change exacted. The hope is that if enough people fix their own errors in this regard, then others will follow suit until there is at last built a culture of genuine and well-ordered love. This is, perhaps, an overly optimistic outlook, but many tend to take up such a disposition when discussing their hopes for the most delightful subject known to man. Maybe we can expect a colder future where love suffers from being devalued in the name of either freedom or morals, but let us always long for the time when love shall create only more love in turn.
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