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Liberated modern culture is awash in sex — but more and more people are starving for love and intimacy. What’s worse, most people seem to believe sex and intimacy are the same thing.

I feel increasingly hopeless about the direction of this culture. There was a time when I believed the worrisome things I was seeing were just minor excesses, but I’ve come to believe the culture is irredeemably dysfunctional.

As a result, most modern Americans are bumper to bumper on a highway toward metaphorical hell — and they’re willing to pay any price to get there, because they believe they’re heading toward a paradise of pleasure.

This is destroying lives. And it’s leaving confused people feeling empty as they find that the life of success and pleasure they were promised has turned into a living nightmare.

Three recent stories have me thinking about this tonight.

First, I saw a HuffPost article this week which was headlined “Here’s When We Can (Probably) Have Casual Sex Again.” It was all about when quarantine restrictions will be sufficiently lifted to allow “normal” people to once again resume having sex with complete strangers they randomly meet.

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I talked with a friend tonight who’s been miserable for years. If she ever loved the man she married, the love died quickly. He’s abusive and dysfunctional. He’s cut her off from her friends and made her life into a nightmare.

I no longer even ask her why she doesn’t leave him. For a long time, I thought she was ready to escape. I sometimes fear for her safety and I always fear for her sanity. But for reasons she can’t explain, this strong and decisive woman hasn’t been able to walk away.

I have no idea why she refuses to fix what she could easily fix.

Earlier this week, a woman moved into a house that she just rented from me. She is extremely happy and satisfied with her new home, even though she’s worked hard all week moving out of the house where she had lived for the last seven years.

I visited the house from which she just moved and I was stunned that she had been paying almost as much to rent that rundown house as she was now paying to rent a nice house that I manage. We talked about how terrible the old house was and how she had been overcharged for the place.

“I’ve realized this week that I’m angry with myself,” she told me. “I knew I was unhappy, but I hate change, so I just ignored how bad everything was. I just don’t understand why I put up with it.”

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My father was often a bully with his children — but he hid it from anyone outside the family.

He didn’t call it bullying, of course, but he believed he had the divine right to whatever he wanted from us. I’m not talking about when we were small children, although he was more overt and hostile about it then. No matter how old we got, he never accepted us as independent adults.

When he faced even the slightest pushback from me — even in the last years of his life — he would get angry and assert his right to control me. He constantly said things such as, “As your father, it’s my right to…” and then he would name whatever he was demanding at the moment.

In psychological terms, my father had no respect for his children’s boundaries. This lack of ability to respect other people’s boundaries is common with narcissists, but since I grew up believing that his practices must be normal, it took me a long time to try to set boundaries with him as an adult.

After I cut off all contact with him more than a decade ago — after he refused to go to therapy with me to deal with our unhealthy relationship — he refused to accept that boundary. He continued to email me, call me and to show up at my door. At times, he was pathetic and manipulative. Other times, he made threats that scared me — sometimes about vague “dire consequences” if I didn’t do what he wanted.

The photo above is from the last time he came to my house.

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