a community of excellence

Our beliefs about sexuality and its purpose lie at the heart of how we relate to other people in our communities. The fact that these beliefs are many and varied is nothing new. What is new, however, is the normalization of sexual behavior that expects increasingly less virtue and commitment from both men and women.

Our University of Virginia community is no exception to this trend. As students at one of the best public universities in the nation and as young adults living in community, we are called not only to contribute our minds and our selves to the disciplines we pursue, but also to honor and respect the intrinsic dignity and sexuality of those around us.

In his closing speech during the “Day of Dialogue” last September, Fr. Michael Suarez challenged us to “understand the aim of our time together as a community not as about success but as about excellence. And the first and most important form of excellence is to fashion lives that body forth an excellence of humanity.” An integral part of this excellence of humanity in our UVa community is a sexual culture that promotes long-term committed relationships. Similarly, this culture must discourage impersonal sexual exchanges where each individual views the other not in light of their sacred personhood but as the means to an end of self-gratification.

Supporting dating relationships that foster the values necessary for a healthy future marriage instead of “hooking-up” in a limited commitment relationship must be no less important for students than pursuing academic excellence in their disciplines. Before we can move beyond the hook-up culture at UVa, it is essential to understand the effect this culture has on the good of the community and the long-term well-being of the individual. The exchange that takes place in a hook-up is one that forfeits a holistic view of human relationships, objectifying the other to a mere body to be used.

Hookups denigrate our university community because they “trivialize our own sexual nature, fail to show respect for ourselves and for our partners, and remove ourselves further from genuine love and true joy" (http://betteryale.org/faqs). The long-term desire of every human person for true acceptance and emotional intimacy can only be fulfilled in relationships of fidelity and total self-gift.

It is a mystery that by freely giving one’s heart, one comes to a deeper knowledge of self. This can happen only in the form of long-term, committed relationships in which each person shares the joys and sorrows of the other and cares for this person in every aspect of his or her being - from moral formation to faith to emotional health to physical well-being - and college is no hiatus to this responsibility.