We had the pleasure of hosting Joy Eggerichs on campus as a part of our week long Sex & the Soul series — conversations exploring the intersection of sex, sexuality and faith.

Joy works for her parents who founded Love & Respect Ministries, which conducts conferences and provides resources to the married, divorced, separated, dating and single. As a young adult, Joy has made it her mission to help young adults learn this message of love and respect long before they ever enter into a marriage relationship.

Why? Because as she worked some of the Love & Respect conferences she found that the #1 comment she heard from conference attendees — over and over again — was, “I wish I knew then, what I know now”

What’s this secret that these individuals are all speaking of.. Love & Respect asked 7000 people this question:

When you are in a conflict with your spouse or significant other, do you feel unloved or disrespected?

And this is what they heard:

83% of the men said “disrespected.”  72% of the women said, “unloved.”

Though we all need love and respect equally, the felt need differs during conflict, and this difference is as different as pink is from blue!

Joy believes that if young people could learn this… their relationships would be different.

So this year our focus for Sex & the Soul has been on how to do “singlehood” well… especially since people are putting off marriage until much later in life — which means that they’re obviously staying single longer — and others will be single for life. But what, then, are they to do with all of those feelings and hormones that rage within during their college years? How can they attempt to be healthy in relationships if they’ve not seen that in their parent’s home, or in the media, or within their friends relationships?

I think that’s where we need to enter in.

We need to be people who understand, teach and live out love and respect in our relationships.

And here’s why:

It will help students in all of their relationships — While the ministry of Love & Respect seems to center around couples who are engaged, married and wanting to grow, and marriages in crisis, the principles of love and respect are universal. They’re biblical! They can be expressed in all relationships — at appropriate levels of course. Imagine how this could revolutionize friendships, or defuse conflict, or even change the very nature of a person…

It will help students to learn how to relate better to the opposite sex — We know that so much of what students think about, and plan their lives around, has to do with finding (or being with) that special someone. And we’ve all seen our students ride relational roller-coasters with others. They, or their significant other — or both! — seem to be playing games, or manipulating situations, or simply being mean and disparaging towards their “other half.” Learning how and why to love and respect someone you’re in a relationship with is of the utmost importance! But who’s teaching them this?

It will set students up well for relationships long after college — Not only will learning about love and respect help students while they’re in college… but it will set the stage for how and who they will be in relationships for many years thereafter. The college years are some of the most formative years of life, and the habits and patterns students set relationally during these years will set a trajectory for the next 5-15 years of life after they graduate — if not beyond.

It could have a dramatic impact on the current hookup culture most campuses experience — In a time of casual sex, non-committal make-out and no-strings-attached one-night stands among college students… this message has the potential (and power) to flip the relational landscape of college life on its head. We need to help students see that the kind of person they desire to be (and God wants them to be), and the kind of relationships they desire to have (and God wants them to have), need to shape who they are and how they live in relationships now.

It could literally save hundreds, if not thousands, of future marriages — And this is something that almost all of our students should be able to relate to. Over 50 % of them come from divorced parents. And for the students whose parents are still together, many of them of seen up-close-and-personal the devastation divorce has caused their friends… not to mention the levels of relational struggle, pain and discord they’ve observed within their own parents’ marriage. If you asked them, I’m sure many students would say that they want something different, something more — something better — for themselves. This — love and respect — is that something.

God has designed us as relational beings.

Jesus most definitely modeled ways of living out both love and respect in a world that did not “get” him.

It is a part of our call to help prepare this upcoming generation to be in relationships well.

And this message of love and respect is a great place to begin!

What do you think?

How do you understand your role in helping students to become healthy in their relationships?

What resources do you use, or direct students to, in this area?

What advice would you give to students struggling to break unhealthy relational patterns — but who also expect their future relationships will be different?

If you’re looking for more resources on this you can check out the Love & Respect website, as well as Joy’s blog: LoveAndRespectNOW.com.