“This better work into a happily ever after.  I’ve put a lot of work into this son of a bitch.”

Now that’s some statement on which to build a life.

I overheard it while working out the other night. Two twenty-something girls were chatting obliviously beside me as I pounded the treadmill. The black-headed one was eager to share with the blonde the details of a lusty encounter with Mr. Right, who apparently was living with someone else.

She explained that he was “so sweet.”  He’d said how much he cared, how he’d been thinking about her all day. He  was not sleeping with this other female; they weren’t intimate, he insisted. He said it was “complicated.” He needed time. She believed him.

“He is such a nice guy” they agreed. He wouldn’t lie. Miss Black Head said she trusted him, and she was willing to wait.

While she apparently was willing to wait for Mr. Right to move out, move in, marry her or whatever, she hadn’t been willing to wait on the sex.

In an eager whisper, she described to Miss Blonde on the treadmill beside me how she’d ripped off her clothes in a moment of abandon and the two had gone at it. When he called later and “emotionally vomited” all over her, she’d thought: “You gotta be kidding. It was just sex.”

She wondered aloud: maybe she should have waited at least another day for them to get together? Clearly, he had  not been ready.

Miss Blonde, the confidant, was sympathetic. Ponytail swinging as she picked up the pace, she acknowledged that “the only thing that’s  kept me is my religion.”

Miss Black Head giggled at that, congratulating her friend on her self-control and adding that she had none.  “I just go for it!”

Pausing briefly, she motioned toward a boy across the room. “Isn’t he cute?! He has a nice butt.”

I did not make this up. Actually happened within ear shot,  actually within reach-out-and-touch distance of me,  a complete stranger.

No shame. No worries. No morals.

It made me sad. These women are nobody’s marriage material. Clueless pawns of culture, they probably consider themselves liberated feminists, free to have sex with whomever they choose, “just like men.”  Naive and nauseating.

Marriage and family were God’s idea, but few people have any regard for marriage’s sacredness any more. Girls routinely “hook up” and still don a white dress on their wedding day, a fashion statement rather than a symbol of any purity. Increasingly, marriage is shunned altogether in favor of cohabitation. The Spring 2014  issue of Duke magazine quotes sociology professor Christina Gibson-Davis as saying:

The emergence of cohabitation as an acceptable context for childbearing has changed the family-formation landscape. Individuals still value the idea of a two-parent family but no longer consider it necessary for the parents to be married.

I soon will have been married 27 years and can testify that marriage is tough even with God in the mix. No self-control, no sensitivity to the emotional consequences of intimacy or concern for the other person beyond getting your own needs met is not a recipe for a happy marriage.

Without God, these young women may get a man to the altar, but they will never have a real marriage no matter how hard they work at it.

“Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” Psalm 127:1