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By
Randall Smith
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THURSDAY,
16 JANUARY 2014
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Real communication is
often more difficult than we imagine, especially when it comes to difficult
topics such sex or romance.
Early on in graduate school, I argued with my friend Ed one day
that he shouldn’t be romantically kissing a woman (as opposed to a simple
kiss of greeting, such as one gives one’s grandmother) unless he was open to
marriage with her. Note, I wasn’t arguing that he had to be ready for
marriage, merely that he had to be open to it, and that if
marriage with this particular woman was unthinkable orimpossible,
then he shouldn’t be engaged in this sort of kissing. My friend had
never heard anybody make such a radical claim before, and at the time, he
found it mostly ludicrous.
“I’m from Northern California,” he insisted to me, “and young
people in California have a sophisticated understanding of sex, so we can
engage in mutual sexual entertainment,” (as he called it), “without it having
to mean anything romantic.” He could, he insisted, “make out” with “a
friend,” and it would be “just for fun.” Nothing else.
Admittedly, different people are different, but I wasn’t so
sure.
A few weeks later, Ed brought a friend of his over to my
apartment to have the same discussion. “Hey, Smith,” he said laughing,
“tell Chris that same thing you told me.”
So I did.
“This is unbelievable,” was Chris’s response. “I mean, it’s
completely out of the Dark Ages.” “I’m from Southern California,”
Chris told me (I was beginning to see a pattern developing), “and we make-out
all the time, and it doesn’t have to mean anything.”
California, it seems, had become the Land of the Meaningless
Kiss.
There was only one problem for Chris. Unfortunately, he
had brought his current girlfriend along to our little discussion. And
although she sat quietly through the whole affair, within a week, they had
broken up. When she and I became friends sometime later, I recounted
that evening to her one day, and she told me: “Yeah, I was sitting there
thinking, ‘What? Kissing doesn’t mean anything? Well,
it meant something to me!”
A smile is just a smile, but a kiss . . . well, that's different. 
It wasn’t so much that Chris was immoral, as he was
simply young and foolish and, of course, from California. And Lord
knows, I was certainly no more “moral” then he was in terms of possessing the
relevant virtues. It’s one thing to know that you don’t know how
to communicate effectively with women about romantic matters, and another
thing to learn how to do it wisely and well. On that score,
I still have very little advice to give young men except this: persevere and
pray.
It’s precisely because I know how little I know about what women
are thinking that I find it strange when other men presume they do.
Chris presumed he knew what his girlfriend wanted; he assumed, without having
discussed it with her, that she shared the same attitudes toward their
physical relationship that he did. The culture he was from had convinced him
that everyone thought the same way about physical intimacy. Worse, he came
from a culture that had convinced him that all women think about physical
intimacy the way rakish men wish they would.
If you think what you do with your body has no intrinsic
meaning, then ask yourself why smiling is a universal expression of happiness
among human beings. There is no group on earth that expresses happiness with
a frown. Indeed, even newborn babies react positively to a smile and cry at
the sight of a frown. Babies can even recognize the difference between a real
smile and a fake smile. Saying that kissing doesn’t have to mean anything
is like saying that smiling doesn’t have to mean you’re happy. The
point, rather, is: it usually does. And people who see you smile thus have
good reason to ask: “Why so happy?” If at that point you were to reply: “Why
does smiling have to mean I’m happy?,” they’d probably wonder what planet you
were from.
So too, doesn’t the person you’ve been kissing have at least a
good prima facie case for thinking that it might have meant
something to you? When we see two people kissing in a movie, do we generally
say: “Look, two friends”? No. We usually say: “Oooh, they love each
other.”
Saying that kissing doesn’t necessarily mean anything is as
foolish as trying to insist that a woman who is cooking you dinner every
night isn’t necessarily interested in a long-term, romantic
relationship. You think I’m kidding, but I once knew a young man who
thought this. “We’re just friends,” he insisted. The fact that this
young woman was cooking for him didn’t suggest a long-term commitment to him,
so he simply assumed it couldn’t possibly mean that for her either. He was
like the child who puts his hands over his eyes and says to the adults around
him: “You can’t see me.”
Young people who are thinking about any kind of physical
intimacy might turn the question around and consider not merely what do I think
(or assume) is going on here, but how might the other person be interpreting
this physical act? Am I presuming that the act “means nothing” because
that’s what I want, not necessarily what she wants?
We live in a pluralistic, multi-cultural world (or so people
say) in which young people are supposed to be sensitive about different
cultures. And we all know that certain totally innocent gestures in the
United States might be interpreted very differently in, say, Italy (don’t
make certain hand gestures there unless you want trouble). So people of good
will try to be careful.
Being careful about other people’s feelings and not presuming
everyone interprets kissing as “merely for entertainment purposes only” might
be a good start when it comes to dealing with the opposite sex.
Unless, of course, you really want to be a
jerk.
Randall B. Smith is Professor at the University of St.
Thomas, where he has recently been appointed to the Scanlan Chair in Theology.
© 2014 The
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commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.
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