Everyone Has To Believe in Something; I Believe I’ll Have Another Lemonade

Two generations ago it was a big deal to come back to your dorm room and find a tie hanging over the doorknob. The implications were as staggering as they were rare: a tie on the door meant your roommate was with a girl in your dorm room! An actual, flesh and blood, honest to goodness girl! “Get lost,” the tie explained. “There’s a girl in here!”

It might have seemed possible that somewhere in the next 50 years under some set of alien circumstances that somehow, some way there might be men at the summit of Everest. Maybe someday a man would run a mile in under four minutes. Who knows? Anything is possible. Heck, conceivably men might someday walk on the moon. But your roommate with a girl in his room? Now that was unlikely.

Yet a scant 50 years later, hookups in college dorm rooms are the common rule rather than the obscure exception. The Sunday morning “walk of shame” across campus is no longer worthy of remark.

The purpose of my gentle diatribe this week is not to decry young adults being sexually active. Indeed, who could argue for the other end of the spectrum? Who would suggest that woman getting married in 1919, say, should not know where babies came from?

My argument is more subtle than “people didn’t know enough about reproductive biology a century ago” or “people know too much about casual sex today.” Nor am I arguing for moderation or condoms, although I certainly favor both. Instead I am lobbying for an assortment of choices. Just as the young couple who are lucky enough to have found each other should be allowed to have their moment alone, so too should the returning boarder be allowed unimpeded access to his digs. As unlikely as it sounds, he might want to study. Or sleep uninterrupted. Three people in a dorm room is not only a crowd but crowded. It’s not the odd man who should be out; it’s the amorous couple who should seek accommodation elsewhere.

You’ll have to consider other venues, gentle readers, to discover that our college-aged children are having more sex than ever before but enjoying it less. My point is only that developmentalists (a fancy word for my graduate degree: my M.S. in Developmental Psychology could be characterized as “home economics with numbers”) talk about “ages and stages”. Not all children are potty trained twenty minutes after their third birthday; not all children learn to read by the start of first grade. It is said that Einstein didn’t speak fluently until age nine. Surely some young adults are ready for satisfying physically intimate relationships during the college years. And others not. We should allow our children to make their choices unimpeded.

Whether or not college campuses are joining the dictionary as the only place where “intercourse” comes before “introduction”, I turn our attention now to campus drinking. Having journeyed to some 200 colleges and having taken the official tour at most of these, I am intimately well acquainted with the company line. The articulate, walking-backwards, tour guide recites, “Sure, there are a few kids on campus who drink alcohol. But there is no pressure to do so.”

Maybe. But combine “misery loves company” with “the more the merrier” and the likelihood of lonely sober kids increases. You could get through the weekend without drinking; you would need to have a good sense of yourself beforehand though. Consider this conversation between an unfortunately overweight young man and a young woman who had recently matriculated at his college.

Young Man: You’re sure you don’t want a glass of wine?

Young woman: No, thank you.

Young Man: You don’t drink?

Young Woman: No.

Young Man: Why don’t you drink?

Young Woman: Why don’t you exercise?

For every strong, self-assured, young woman who knows who she is and what she wants, there is another first year college student who will be influenced by the “everyone else is doing is” zeitgeist.

We allow our college-age kids to pick their majors; we allow our college-age kids to pick their roommates. As parents and educators we should let our college-age kids know that we allow them to choose sobriety and discretion as well.