In the past year I have been honored to work with young adults from across the country in the field of sexual wellness. They have given me renewed hope for a better direction for our culture going into the future. These young adults made me aware of a trend in which, for specified period of time, which can be months or even up to a year, they abstain from dating and focus on relating to the opposite sex as friends. In many cases this has been practiced on college campuses in the midst of a sea of hookup culture and porn.
Some of these young people who had done this in some cases for over a year seem to be some of the most well-adjusted and mature young adults that I had ever had the honor to work with. With their choice to do this they had absolutely demonstrated consistency, intentionality, and faithfulness to their Christian beliefs. They seem to be very happy and in control of themselves after having taken their impulses under control and lived a life that was the polar opposite of most of their college friends for an extended period of time.
GOOD CLEAN FUN
One of their characteristics that really stood out was the way that when we were all in a group, we would all be laughing about some of the funniest morally clean things that happened to them on their journeys that I could imagine. There was something just really good about being able to laugh about these things that happened that demonstrated their strong commitment to ethics and morality but were at the same time, sidesplittingly funny circumstances among these young adults who were now in couples and navigating relationships. It was the old expression “just clean fun!”
I made a mental note of this, and beyond a strong admiration of what they had demonstrated, did not give it much more thought. That is, until my research brought me upon the concept of dopamine depletion. This is a widespread phenomenon in our 21st century society. Basically, the problem is that as outlined in earlier posts, our lives do not match up very well with the lives of our ancestors. Here, we are having too many hedonistic pleasurable experiences in close succession and chronically. Our ancestors had very few of them and had to work very hard to get them.
MODERN DOPAMINE SPIKING LIFESTYLE
What am I talking about here? Well for one thing the way we typically eat. For example, the amount of sugar we consume per day now compared to the past. In 1700, the average intake of sugar per day was about 5 g. By 2009 the average had risen to 227 g per day. Sweet tastes spike dopamine levels. Every time dopamine spikes it crashes and lowers the baseline level. Eventually this leads to depression and the need to eat more and more sugar to get the same pleasurable high.
The same thing happens with sex. Hookup culture with its continuous casual sex to orgasm does the same thing to dopamine except more extremely. The same is true of porn use. Again, this is not Natural Lifestyle Matching in any way. Hookup culture and porn use can be looked at as behavioral addictions that are dopamine depleting. The dating abstinence that I have witnessed from the young adults I’ve had the honor of working with this year has the opposite effect. It is dopamine replenishing.
JUNK FOOD AND JUNK SEX
So, a hedonistic lifestyle, whether it be in the area of eating or the area of sex, is destructive to humans. One way we can think about it is that neither Junk Food nor Junk Sex is good for us. The Bible speaks to this:
“If you find honey eat just enough-too much of it and you will vomit.”
Proverbs 25:16 NIV
“Treat older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity.”
1 Timothy 5:1-2
This clean, biblical approach to life allows us to relate to each other with a clean conscience and really become good friends that can have a great time together. When I saw these young adult women and men relating to each other in this way, it made me and them laugh!
