Hooking Up : Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus by Kathleen Bogle (e book reader android txt) 📗

get married and [be] married for a year, I am thirty. “Let’s have kids now,” that is what I wanted. And I don’t even see that happening soon. So I am like “Great! Okay, [my plan is] out the window!” [I guess I’ll have to move to] Plan B. [Laughs]

Lucille, a 23-year-old Faith University alumnus, offered the following: Lucille:My main group of friends is very, I call it boy crazy. They want a boyfriend so bad they can taste it. [There are] lots of tears when they get drunk. They get very emotional about it.

KB: About guys?

Lucille:Yeah.

KB: About what aspects, [what] brings them to tears?

Lucille:When they get drunk they get very emotional. [Crying voice] “I don’t have a boyfriend and I just want a boyfriend.

Why can’t I find someone?” That type of thing.

Claudia, a 25-year-old alumnus of Faith University, described a common difficulty:

KB: Would you say that you are happy with the social life that is available to you post-college and the dating opportunities?

Is what’s out there good or is it a struggle?

Claudia: Socially it’s good. I am happy with my friends. Good group of people and we always have a good time. But dating, there is not really a whole lot out there. Like two of my good friends, unbelievably handsome men, very intelligent, very fun, and of course they are both gay. [Laughs] Of course you 156

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got to wonder if they are really good looking and intelligent, if they work, if they are employed, that is always a good one

[laughs], and you’re not going to support them, they are usually gay. It’s unfortunate [that many men of interest] are also married. So that is a struggle. There is not, I don’t see a bunch of great guys, even a bunch [of] mature or even nice guys. A lot of them are very self-centered, it’s almost like a lot of them are, I guess the term is “players.” They will just date as many girls as they can. And they are like: “I got to do it now before I get married.” I think too many are like that.

Others are just not, there is no, what is the word, real emotion. They just kind of go through their day and then it’s just another thing on their list: work, date. I haven’t met too many really okay, decent guys. If I have, they are usually gay or married. I mean I know they are out there somewhere, maybe it’s just like I don’t know the areas they are in. I assume there are some out there.

For the women, finding someone was only part of the problem. Like their college counterparts, alumni women were also eager to turn casual relationships into more committed ones and to hang on to boyfriends once they found them. Thus, the struggle between men and women over what they want from relationships continues after college.

THE HOOKUP ERA

The college hookup scene has lasting effects on alumni. First, graduates share a hooking-up background. After college, men and women enter a dating scene that is new to them because the hookup culture on campus is all that most of them have known. Despite being thrust into dating, some alumni yearn for a return to the hookup scene whenever circumstances permit. Their shared experience allows the hookup to reemerge sometimes (e.g., summertime at the beach). The fact that the postcollege environment utilizes both the dating and hookup scripts could lead to some confusion among singles when two parties might not be on the

“same page.” This scenario was played out many times in alumni accounts of one person trying to go too far sexually (according to the hookup script) when the other party was thinking of it as a date (and ll I F E A F T E R C O ll ll E G E

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behaving more conservatively as a result). In other cases, alumni, such as Elizabeth, spoke of being irritated that some men were still in hookup mode when she wanted to be asked out on dates.

Second, the focus of the social scene remains (as it was in college) on friendship groups. After graduation, alumni go on dates, but spending time with groups of friends and engaging in alcohol-centered socializing is the centerpiece of social life for many. Although dating replaced hooking up as the primary means for beginning romantic and sexual relationships, it is not as central to social life as hooking up was during college. On campus, partying and hooking up went hand in hand. That is not to say that every student hooked up after every party, but hooking up was going on every weekend. The alumni I interviewed went on dates, but they were not immersed in a dating culture the way they were immersed in a hookup culture in college. Even the most active in the singles scene do not go on dates on a weekly basis.

The infrequency of dating was a problem for some of the men and women who were looking for a relationship but having difficulty finding one. Many were not satisfied with trying to find dates via the bar scene. This may account for the popularity of internet dating, speed dating, and other organized attempts to help singles find dating partners.9

Even a cursory look at the profiles on Web sites such as match.com reveals that men and women turn to these resources because more traditional avenues are not working for them.

Thus, hooking up is not just a meaningless phase that young people go through in college. Rather, the sexual and romantic lives of men and women who come of age in the hookup era are continuously shaped by their past experiences with the campus hookup culture.

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Hooking Up and Dating

A Comparison

In The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, historian Stephanie Coontz challenges those who lament the loss of “traditional family values” by debunking myths about families of the past.1

Coontz contends