The Week had a thoughtful article recently on love in the time of hooking up (full article posted here and here).
“In the dating era, students would go on a date, which might lead to something sexual,” says Kathleen Bogle, a sociologist at Philadephia’s La Salle University. “In the hookup era, students hook up, which might lead to dating.”
Is hooking up harmful? Depends on whether you ask peers or professionals.
Many college kids scoff at that very question. They say they’re just having fun, and that as long as both people understand the terms, it’s win-win. But some health professionals have raised alarms about the spread of sexually transmitted disease, and warn that many young adults are paying a price for learning to divorce sex from feelings and attachments.
“They don’t learn to build that emotional intimacy before they get physically intimate,” says adolescent gynecologist Melissa Holmes. “They may grow up not knowing how to connect with a partner on an intimate level.”
James Cox, director of the counseling center at the University of Pittsburg, says more than a quarter of his clients come in with anxiety, depression, and other emotional problems because their relationships feel superficial and confusing.
“Hooking up is like any other kind of peer pressure,” he says. “We need to encourage students to make independent, healthy choices.” That may be especially true for women.
Why especially for women?
… [M]any experts say that, sexual revolution or no, most women do not share men’s capacity for meaningless sexual encounters.
One study found that women are more likely to view hookups as an avenue to finding relationships, and that when two partners hook up repeatedly, it usually means the woman wants a relationship, while the many may not.
A 2007 survey found that men are more than three times as likely as women to feel satisfied after a one-night stand, while women are twice as likely to feel regret or shame.
Is hooking up just a college thing?
There’s no hard data, but some sociologists say the hooking-up campus culture may be seeping into the broader one.
[snip]
Still, for many young people, the thrill of bedding lots of partners without any emotional attachment does eventually wear off.
“You have contact with many, many more people, but each of those relationships takes up a little bit less of your life,” says 25-year-old May Wilkerson of New York City. “That fragmentation creates a lot of loneliness.”
Hmmm … maybe hooking up should be called Friends with NO Benefits.