“They don’t know about love,” said Henning, who speaks about boy-girl relationships to Grade 7 and up students students full-time. He hopes that by the time students hit Grade 9 they will understand what he means.
“I give them a definition of love and I tell them by the end of this time, you’re going to know if your boyfriend or girlfriend loves you,” he said in a phone interview with The Catholic Register.
Based in the United States, Henning comes to Canada about twice a year; his last visit was to Red Deer, Alta., in October.
He said he uses humour to draw his audience in, calling it the “cross-cultural language of kids.” Even though he speaks mainly at public schools south of the border, he grounds his argument in Christian principles, making his message desirable to Catholic and other Christian schools.
His talk has three main components: the difference between men and women, the definition of love and why wait to have sex.
For the first component, Henning breaks down the difference in how men and women think, how they communicate, their desires and their needs. He explains why it can be so hard to understand the opposite sex.
His talk in general includes three top things boys should know about girls and vice versa.
“Girls are very personal and guys aren’t,” said Henning, adding that boys will call a girl fat or slug a girl because that’s how they treat their male friends. “You don’t do that with a girl. Girls take everything very, very personally. And they don’t forget those comments.”
He also says that “Guys tend to be goal-oriented. Girls tend to be far more detail-oriented. When it comes to sex, he’s goal-oriented. When he reaches his goal, what does he do? Next. And girls don’t get that… Being goal-oriented as a guy, that’s a really healthy thing, but can he misuse it when it comes to sex? A girl has to date a guy that understands being goal-oriented is good, but if he takes that to the extreme in his sexual life, you’ve got the wrong guy.”
And while girls value security, boys value their freedom said Henning.
“She wants security. If she gets pregnant and has a baby, she wants to know is this guy really going to take care of me, be a dad and father to my kids?”
But in a society where money translates into security, men will accuse women of being gold diggers.
“A guy wants to know, do you love me because of who I am or my potential financially? A girl wants to know, is it me you love or my potential in bed? So there’s security (and) freedom. Both of those in their own right are healthy, (but men and women need) to understand the other person’s needs when it comes to those kinds of things. If they don’t, they’re in serious trouble,” he said.
After covering male-female differences, Henning transitions to the definition of love: “choosing the highest good for the other person.” He says, “you can’t blackmail, threaten, push anyone to love you. If a guy says to a girl, ‘If you break up with me, I’ll kill myself,’ right now you know he doesn’t love you.”
Then comes the third part of his talk — sex. Henning avoids the world abstinence, calling it a turnoff.
“In the first two parts — the difference between men and women and what love is — I am building a case” for why kids should wait to have sex, he said.
Henning talks about how sex with numerous partners hurts both men and women, saying that men will compare a woman to every other woman with whom he’s had sex.
“It’s killing girls and of course it’s killing guys,” he said. For example, if a guy has had sex with 20 to 30 girls, when a guy finally meets the girl of his dreams, he doesn’t want to hurt that girl by having sex with her, “even though he wants to have sex with her.”
In his talks, Henning asks the boys, “Do you mind if some other guy tonight is going to bed with your future wife and doing what you’re planning to do to your girlfriend tonight? And not one in a thousand kids will raise their hand.”
Henning goes on to say that today’s culture is degrading femininity.
“Girls now in America think for instance if guys want to be sexual, then we’ll be sexual too. Guys want to treat people badly, then we’ll treat people badly too. So girls wind up losing that feminine side... they are thinking that to be a woman you have to be like a guy. And it’s killing girls,” he said.
Henning also splits the boys and girls up, talking to them separately, so each group feels free to ask the toughest questions. So under the “For Students” section on his web site (www.bradhenning.com), he has posted the most common questions and answers for girls and creative dating tips for boys, among other helpful topics.