Whither Eros: Sex, Careers, and Desire on College Campuses

Our desires aren’t too strong—they’re too weak.

Love and Psyche by the painter Jacques Louis David. The painting was criticized for its realist depiction of Eros (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The word “eros” invariably calls to mind love and sex. While these are no doubt important parts of the word’s meaning, the classical conception of the word was much richer. For the classics, eros encapsulated not only love but also human longing and desire more broadly. Embracing the classical view of eros could do much to assuage our modern malaise.

Two sources elucidate the classical concept of eros; the first is the myth of Eros and Psyche. Eros was the classical god of love and sex, and Psyche, which means soul in Greek, was a beautiful woman. In the myth, Eros falls in love with Psyche, but he leaves her after she betrays his trust. Psyche seeks help from Aphrodite, who gives Psyche four arduous tasks. Psyche completes these tasks with help from Eros, achieving reunion with Eros and ultimately immortality. Here, eros elevates the soul towards immortality.

The second source is Plato’s Symposium. In it, Socrates recounts his dialogue with Diotima, an expert on eros. She explains that eros involves recognizing one’s spiritual poverty and seeking transcendence through constant striving. Diotima then describes what is often called “the ladder of love.” She explains that when properly practiced, eros ascends from desiring lower objects like bodies to desiring higher objects like souls. She argues that this ascent culminates in desire for beauty itself, which is eternal and unchanging. The perpetual human temptation is to stop our ascent along the ladder of love and remain fixated on lower objects, content to rest on a lower rung.

Our contemporary campus culture often encourages such fixation. For example, Christine Emba, who recently spoke at CMC’s Athenaeum, argues that students have lowered their expectations when it comes to sexual ethics. At CMC, many students opt for shallow “hookups” or halfhearted “situationships” instead of awaiting or pursuing long-term romances, much less marriages. Sometimes, students settle for even less than hookups. A 2020 study found that 92% of men and 60% of women reported using pornography in the past month. Meanwhile, only 43% of men and 55% of women are in a long-term relationship of some form.

We can also see this kind of perfunctory eros in our campus career climate. As Shiah Sarkowsky discusses in a recent Forum article, CMC students imitate the prestige and money-seeking career aspirations of their peers rather than interrogating their true desires. They settle for a career at McKinsey or Morgan Stanley without pausing to think about what a good life looks like. In the words of Sarkowsky, this behavior “corrodes our souls.”

Many identify these phenomena as symptoms of excessive desire. If only we could stifle our sexual desires or check our career ambitions, then we could find true contentment. But this cheap asceticism ignores the transcendent power of desire. In the words of C.S. Lewis, our desires aren’t too strong—they’re too weak. We’re not too hard to please—we’re too easily sated. We fool about with vapid sex and vacuous careers when life has so much more to offer.

No doubt technology is partly responsible for this castration of desires. Instant gratification is kryptonite for Eros. TikTok and Instagram dull our senses. Tinder and PornHub promote desultory lustfulness at the expense of unadulterated passion. LinkedIn flattens the experience of our careers into a self-congratulatory social media post. These platforms geld our desires, impoverish our souls, and leave us with a deep sense of dissatisfaction.

Eros tells us to pay attention to that sense of dissatisfaction, that nagging feeling in your heart that something is missing. Too often, we ignore that feeling. Despite what some ethicists may say, desires are an important facet of our moral constitution. Desires give us clues about what’s truly good. That’s not to say that we can’t desire bad things. Desires must be governed by reason and directed toward the highest good. We must, to use another Lewis phrase, chase the sunbeam back up to the sun.

I’m no exception to the pattern of deflated eros. I frequently fall off love’s ladder. Moreover, it’s not as though eros is fully absent from campus. Some students and professors indulge in the genuine pursuit of truth, and some senior couples have sustained courtships over their four years here. Eros is by no means dead, but it is on life support.

So what can we do? Interrogate your desires. Notice how they are structured. Keep climbing the ladder. Don’t come to rest in anything but the highest good. We likely won’t find that rest in this lifetime, and we may have to die for it. But if we fail to do these things, Eros will come to look less like a god and more like a demon.