A number of years ago I was chatting with a friend in his townhouse in Arlington. We were getting ready to go for a hike, and I was asking him about life, relationships, etc. He mentioned that he wasn't with his semi-long term boyfriend anymore. In the interim, he mentioned--confessed, almost, with hesitancy--that he was making use of the gay hookup app Grindr. The way he described it, you would have thought one was ordering a pizza via Doordash: post a few pics, swipe a few swipes, and all of a sudden, a guy is ringing his doorbell at one in the morning. They do their thing, that is that, and the stranger leaves just as soon as he came in.
The only thing new in this context is the technology, (albeit with a gay twist in this context, which I'm not going to write about). People have been having meetings of indiscretion for ages, though in the modern age the "hookup culture" is more ubiquitous than aberration. But beyond the normal (sexual) appetite--which traditionally was confined in the bonds of marriage--what fuels it?
Timothy Keller in his talk The Struggle For Love makes reference to Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist and secular atheist, and his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial Of Death (which was actually written 50 years ago). With regards to secular modern man:
"We still need to feel that our life matters in the grand scheme of things...but if we no longer have God, how are we to do this? And one of the first ways that occurred to the modern person was the "romantic solution." The self-glorification that we need in our innermost being we now look for in the love partner. What is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to this position? We want to be rid of our faults, our feelings of nothingness. We want to be justified. We want to know our existence hasn't been in vain We want redemption. Nothing less."
The sexual appetite is the constant, n. What has changed in the formula is the isolation we have to deal with, the vacuum we have created by removing God from our lives. The inner emptiness seeks to be filled, since nature abhors a vacuum.
Keller speaks of this emptiness in the story of Jacob in Genesis 29, who seeks the love he didn't receive from his father, Isaac. In a twist of irony, Laban "switches out" Jacob's love (the object of his romantic affection) Rachel with Leah, just as Jacob sought his father's affirmation in stealing the birthright of his brother Esau. The Hebrew term for "deceit" is the same in both contexts. Jacob is wounded, and after seven years of serving Laban is not preoccupied with being wed to Rachel, but (crassly) to "lie with her." Rachel will complete him, seal his emotional wounds. Of course, Rachel remains barren for fourteen years before giving birth to Joseph, and the "unloved" Leah eventually gives birth to Judah, the line of which the Messiah will come.
We are all looking for love, for meaning, for connection. And we settle for hookups. Why? Because we are horny, looking to scratch and itch? Maybe on the surface. But if you've lived through hook-up culture like I have, that's only half the story. The other, more telling half is that loneliness is the gasoline we throw on the coals to keep the fire going. It flares up for a moment, but there's no solid mass to keep it going. If we're not careful, too, we end up getting some of the gasoline on our clothing or body and burn ourselves.
Modern man is incredibly, incredibly lonely. And loneliness is so powerful, so difficult to endure, that we will use people in the most intimate way, robbing by deceit, just to gain a few moments respite from it. Even in a marriage, people can feel this way, but these coals can be stoked, whereas the single person must grapple with an empty fire ring that must be built from scratch.
Why is modern man so lonely? Because he has made no room for God, the eternal ember of Love that is never extinguished. In reducing his personhood to appetites and urges to be satisfied, an existential loneliness that must be assuaged at all costs, man has nothing to keep him going except with a constant leap-frog of largely meaningless encounters. This is not how we were meant to flourish.
Marriage is more than a repository to curb concupiscence. And it must be more than simply a romantic preoccupation with covering over our wounds. Hookup culture is the Splenda that leaves a bitter aftertaste. What God reserves for those who love Him is honey, "Eat honey, my son, for it is good; honey from the comb is sweet to your taste." (Prov 24:13) In its fullness, a healthy marriage is the cure for loneliness, the proper ends of our sexual appetite, and in its fruitful expression, the generation of children. It's what most people, in their heart of hearts, are really searching for. Whether they know it or not.
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