Author Warns Parents of Casual Sex Pitfalls Awaiting College Students
By Jim Brown
July 20, 2005

(AgapePress) - Dr. Jennifer Morse, a popular writer and speaker on family issues, says modern patterns of dating on college campuses are destructive when it comes to finding life-long married love.

Morse has written a new book called Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World (Spence Publishing Company, 2005). In it, she warns parents who are sending a child to college this fall that most can expect casual sexual encounters, co-ed dorms, and even co-habitation to be part of their kids' lives for the next four years.

The author says hookups -- that is, encounters involving casual, recreational sex -- are not conducive to making a proper judgment about who will be one's lifelong partner. "If you start off with the idea that sex is a recreational activity with no moral or social significance," she asserts, "you're going to be drawn to the wrong persons, you're going to be doing the wrong kinds of things -- you're just not going to be in the right kind of mode for finding somebody with whom you can share life-long love."

At schools with co-ed dormitories and sometimes even co-ed rooming groups, it is not uncommon for students who live in close proximity to begin having sex. Again, Morse says this can be relationally damaging in the long term, as social science research has shown that couples living together before marriage are more likely to divorce than couples who do not co-habit before marriage.

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