The meanings of words change through time; i.e., gay, discriminating, the dictionary gives what is a clear understanding of how the word is used in today’s language.
Well, that’s correct, but we also have contexts in which words retain their old proper meanings, purists who won’t acknowledge certain changes and so on. Discrimination for a scientist will be a neutral word, gay for a poet or an elderly person will still be just happy etc etc. Dictionaries depend on the authority of those who compile them. Some of them have already stopped listing the pronunciation that used to be the only correct one (e.g. I always pronounce the “t” in “often”, but next to no dictionary lists such a pronunciation nowadays). Some of them clearly have an agenda, for example when they list strange things like “d’oh” as words.
I suggest that if you discuss this problem with your confessor he will advise you to give up going to the beach if you can’t mentally handle it.
But what about living together then? Some couples will handle it, some won’t. We must not assume that all will, nor that none could. Neither must we forbid cohabitation under the penalty of a separate sin to prevent them from failing. Keeping a clear, undistorted picture always helps better than adjustments made even for the gravest of reasons and best intentions.
You can dance, schmance and swivel around it - the facts are that with human nature being what it is, hormones and the young being where they are in growing up, any good confessor would tell a young healthy couple they are pretty much fooling themselves at worst and playing with fire at best.
Well, you have a point there. You see, my upbringing made me expect insane levels of self-control from people. From time to time, I come to realise in the painful way that this is not the case with the modern people. In a certain forum where I was sort of notorious for no tolerance margin for infidelity and cheating (and for saying thinks like it does matter whether you send a guy a text message before or after sleeping with his best friend), I met a girl who wanted to know if I really made no exceptions. I confirmed that none applied. We could discuss mitigating circumstances for specific persons but it was never OK to cheat. Then she asked, “What if, I’m not even saying a few months, but what if my boyfriend were away for a few weeks and I needed sex?” (and few weeks was more like two than seven or eight). I’ll spare you the “But why control myself?” part of that discussion. Anyway, if that’s the case with modern people, then you have a huge point and I had better take another reality check. Thanks for reminding me. By the way, I knew a guy who left his fiance for that same girl. That is, he left her emotionally and she sealed it physically. It started from some chatting on the internet, first public then private and then some “innocent” flirting popped up until, even though he denied everything and defied all my warnings, the guy ended up telling me that she mattered everything for him or that he only wanted to bed her and move on - in turns, and he saw no contradiction in changing mind like that, so he was brain-drained by the whole thing. Recalling this story renders me much more skeptical than I was at the beginning of this thread.
At any rate, I am going cynically to ask why move in together? What is the purpose of that? Deep inside the soul and so on? Why insist so much? Sometimes reasons are pretty valid. I’d rather share a room with a female friend than a male stranger, myself. Then what point getting separate rooms on holidays: cash doesn’t grow on trees and I know better ways of spending it on holidays. And so on and so forth. If I were female, however, I would keep in mind that guys are both the stronger and the more inclined to drink of the two genders.
As I see it, cohabitation for modern couples is meant to be a show. It does have some deeply rooted defiance and rebellion against the system etc etc, doesn’t it? I’m somehow distrustful towards all such shows. Where there is a show, there is an agenda. And that agenda is probably something we don’t really like.
So, so much as I have no problem with the sole fact of a couple living together (depending on the point of view, one could make them an example of how people actually are able to control themselves), I see the merit in your points and I’m afraid I have to agree.
