Hooking Up or Settling Down

Donna Freitas is on a crusade against hooking up:

Is hooking up a form of sexual experimentation? You’d think so. After all, hookups are all about throwing off the bonds of relationships and dating for carefree sex. But such hypersexuality can be just as oppressive as a mandate for abstinence. Hookup sex is fast, uncaring, unthinking, perfunctory. It has a lot less to do with excitement or attraction than with checking a box on a list of tasks, like homework or laundry. Yet, it has become the defining aspect of social life on many campuses — so common, so obligatory, that it leaves little room for experimentation that bends the rules.

I’ve spent the past eight years investigating hookup culture and talking with students, faculty members and college administrators about it. I thought I would find that the vast majority of students revel in it, but instead I encountered a large percentage who feel confined by it or ambivalent about it (the “whateverists,” as I call them). Nervous to be alone in challenging hookup culture, most students go along with it, even if they privately long for alternatives. They think that if they try to be less casual about sex, it’ll ruin their social lives. Conformity abounds. . . . Of the 1,230 students who answered an optional survey question in a study I conducted asking what their peers thought about sex in 2006, 45 percent of participants at Catholic schools and 36 percent at nonreligious private and public schools said their peers were too casual about sex.

Freitas thinks that many if not most students hate hooking up and only do it because the think it is expected of them, and that many of them feel bad about the experience.

I am no fan of hooking up myself, but I have to ask: what is the alternative?

In our society, people marry late -- I think the median age at first marriage for college educated Americans is about 28. Our popular culture is highly sexualized, and we routinely throw young men and women together in highly sexual situations like college dorms. So it seems silly to me to think most Americans will stay chaste until marriage. Young Americans are going to have sex; the only question is how.

I am dubious of statements like "the culture says you have to do x, so I do x even though I don't want to." Even if people dislike hooking up as much as Freitas thinks (which I doubt), they still do it, which means they prefer it to not hooking up. Freitas thinks many students would like to go on old-fashioned dates, and some of them told her that. I am also dubious when people say they would like to do something but aren't actually doing it. It seems to me that if students really wanted to go on dates, they would go on dates. If you ask me, only people who have never been on a date would say they want more of them, but I guess somebody must like them.

I think the only realistic alternative to hooking up is for people to quickly form long-term relationships. Twenty-five years ago I was reading articles about the college fad for shacking up together, and for using the words "marriage", "husband," and "wife" to describe college romances. This is what I did, launching at 18 into what I was sure would be the love of my life. It didn't work out. As I look around me at other such relationships, I see that many progress very quickly to living together and making promises of lifelong commitment, and that many end up as disasters. I am not entirely sure that this is better for people than hooking up.

If most college students are dissatisfied with hooking up, this is only a subset of a broader truth: most single people under 50 are dissatisfied with their love lives. Romance is just very hard, however you go about it.