Committed Sex
Contributed by Andrew Love
We live in a world that fears commitment.
We can’t commit to phone companies (or phones for that matter),
We can’t commit to a job or for many, even a career,
We can’t commit to a religious worldview...
But most of all, the scariest form of commitment, is that of love.
The hippies did a masterful job of divorcing responsibility from pretty much every aspect of life. The crowning jewel of the peace & love movement was the total denigration of commitment itself, reducing it to a hollow, feeble version of itself. Commitment fell from a virtue to uphold down to an annoying inconvenience to avoid.
The hippies gave birth to a generation of skeptical people who clung to sarcasm, grunge music, and the overwhelming cultural acceptance that marriage doesn’t work and the deeply held belief that committed love causes pain.
Over the past decade, we’ve seen digital communication speeds ramp up and human communication (interpersonal) speeds dry up. The hastened pace of our digital lives has eroded our attention spans and caused us to create a mental landscape that makes it difficult to commit to even reading a full blog post (cough, cough….)
The effects of a shortened attention span result in detachment and loneliness as people tend to focus more on media content that is minimalized to capture their attention, than actual meaningful conversations.
Take a quick mental check and calculate your computer time vs. people time per day—even when you are around your friends, your phone is constantly in your hand and every buzz or beep forces you to instantly draw your attention back to your screen!
Shocking, isn’t it? By the end of the day, you are not certain what you gained from meeting up, but you are dead sure of the gossip going on online!
With everything right in the palm of our hands, we are assured to get what we want through our devices:
Need something—Amazon.
Checking up on someone—Facebook.
Need to see life through a rose-colored lens—Instagram.
Struggling with life and want to escape for a while—YouTube.
I am spot on, aren’t I?
On the other hand, sex is, of course, a massive part of this situation as well. The porn industry is thriving because of two aforementioned factors:
Low attention spans
Disconnection from our hearts
With algorithms getting smarter by the day, porn sites know how to give you little blasts of chemical peaks which act as breadcrumbs leading you down a dangerous Hansel and Gretel trail. The further we go down that path, the more we disengage from our hearts and lose ourselves to endless sexual cravings.
The fact that one porn website alone garnered over 30 billion website visits last year is evidence that we are collectively participating in the separation of commitment and sex on a granular level.
However, at High Noon, we work with many young people who were essentially raised in a porn-filled society. Everything they know about sex revolves around what they learn from porn sites and not their parents or people who care enough to give them proper sex education. When someone has been exposed to millions of pornographic images during their formative years, it results in the inadequacy to commit to marriage and further causes massive amounts of anxiety.
When someone can’t commit to quitting porn, they feel like they don’t have the ability to commit to a person. They are trapped in a life they did not choose for themselves as they were unaware of what they were exposed to at a young age. Instead of striving to develop loving relationships, their world is darkened by secrecy.
BUT, THERE IS HOPE!
There is a process to reverse this damage.
There is a pathway back to commitment.
There is a trend created by people who have developed the will to break their porn addiction as they have redirected their energy into committing to their ideals.
So, stand firm and bravely reaffirm the mantra: “Enough is enough! I am more than you have made of me! I too deserve love!”
Pledge your freedom!
On a brighter note, February brought with it a wave of young people who attended the marriage blessing ceremony after going through the commitment ceremony. They cleaned up their web-browsers, rewired their minds and further broaden their hearts’ bandwidth to love their spouses.
Even though some are still struggling with pornography, they are doing much better than before! And, some have totally eradicated their lives of porn to make room for their futures.
Our sexuality is meant to be a gift, not a curse.
How we direct our sexual energy very much determines the quality of love we experience in our short lifetime. Commitment is the magic that unlocks the vulnerability that is required for intimacy to reign and for our Heavenly Parent to be present.
Sex is a gift.
Connect to our Heavenly Parent and commit to a loving relationship.