Casual Sex On the Rise

by Carlin from Betty Dobson

When it comes down to it, relationships take a ton of time.  I never thought of the hookup as the replacement for dating...and I never thought of it as a time management issue.  Thank you NPR for this piece on Sex Without Intimacy:

The hookup - that meeting and mating ritual that started among high school and college students - is becoming a trend among young people who have entered the workaday world. For the many who are delaying the responsibilities of marriage and child-rearing, hooking up has virtually replaced dating.

It is a major shift in the culture over the past few decades, says Kathleen Bogle, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University.

Young people during one of the most sexually active periods of their lives aren't necessarily looking for a mate. What used to be a mate-seeking ritual has shifted to hookups: sexual encounters with no strings attached.

"The idea used to be you are going to date someone that is going to lead to something sexual happening," Bogle says. "In the hookup era, something sexual happens, even though it may be less than sexual intercourse, that may or may not ever lead to dating."

Young people from high school on are so preoccupied with friends, getting an education and establishing themselves, they don't make time for relationships.

New Goal: Fun, Not Marriage

"Going out on a date is a sort of ironic, obsolete type of thing," says 25-year-old Elizabeth Welsh, who graduated from college in 2005 and now lives in Boston. She says that among her friends, dating is a joke. "Going out on a date to dinner and a movie? It's so cliche - isn't that funny?"

It seems it's far easier to have casual sexual encounters or hookups, though several national surveys of college students found a stalwart 28 percent who remain virgins. The term "hookup" is so vague, however, it might well encompass someone's idea of virginity - it involves anything from kissing to fooling around, oral sex and sexual intercourse.

"For me, it's been anytime that I was attracted to a guy and we spent the night together," Welsh says. "It has been sex; it has just been some sort of light making out. That's the beautiful thing about the phrase. Whatever happened is hooking up."

Bogle interviewed college students on a small and a large campus, as well as recent college graduates, to find out what was going on. The hooking-up phenomena has been traced back to the 1960s and the 1970s, when male and female students were thrown together in apartment-style dormitories, and there was a revolt against strict rules on having a member of the opposite sex in your dorm, lights out and curfews.

"What you see on college campuses now, even in some cases Catholic campuses, is that young men and women have unrestricted access to each other," Bogle says. Throw in the heavy drinking that occurs on most campuses, and there are no inhibitions to stand in the way of a hookup.

The alumni Bogle spoke with were less into hooking up after leaving college, but she says that's changing. It is catching on among young working adults, mainly because of the Internet and social networks.

The Evolution Of Dating

Dating itself represented a historical change. It evolved out of a courtship ritual where young women entertained gentleman callers, usually in the home, under the watchful eye of a chaperone. At the turn of the 20th century, dating caught on among the poor whose homes were not suitable for entertaining, according to Beth Bailey's history of dating, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America.

Young couples would go out for a movie or dinner. The expectation was that dating, as with courtship, would ultimately lead to a relationship, the capstone of which was marriage. Precious few of these young women attended college.

According to experts, the main reason hooking up is so popular among young people is that in the United States and other Western countries, the age at which people marry for the first time has been steadily creeping up. As of 2005, in the United States, men married for the first time around the age of 27, and women at about 25 years of age.

Bogle says the hookup is what happens when high school seniors and college freshmen suddenly begin to realize they won't be marrying for five, 10 or 15 years.

Prioritizing Career And Social Life

Marriage is often the last thing on the minds of young people leaving college today.

"My first few years out of college was about trying to get on my feet and having a good time," Welsh says. Dating and a relationship interfered with that.

Avery Leake, 25, knows what this is like from the other side. He's in a relationship now, but he says that, in general, most of the young women he used to meet "just wanted sex. They're independent." Being in a relationship was not important to them, especially if it interfered with their careers or their pursuit of advanced degrees, he says.

Leake found that he was also up against women who had as much money as he had, if not more, and he says dating had just become too expensive. "You used to be able to get away with paying $30 for a dinner and a movie," Leake says. "Not anymore."

Empowerment Or Loss Of Intimacy?

A number of experts accept this relaxed attitude toward sex outside of relationships as a natural consequence of the sexual revolution, women's growing independence and the availability of modern contraceptives. But Deborah Roffman, who conducts human sexuality workshops for middle- and high-school-age students and their parents, sees that as a distorted view of liberation.

"It's not a new model. I think most people would probably look back and agree that this has been a more traditionally, or at least stereotypically, male model," says Roffman. "What I've seen over the last few years is girls adopting a more compartmentalized view, and feeling good and empowered by it."

She's not convinced that this is a good thing for women, and says that being able to say yes is only one way of looking at freedom. She would feel much better if young men also were developing a greater capacity for intimacy.

Being able to engage in intimate relationships where men and women bring all of themselves to the relationship is the cornerstone of family, Roffman says.

But young people like Elizabeth Welsh don't see the hookup as an obstacle to future relationships:

"It is a common and easy mistake," Welsh says, "to assume that the value of friendship and those relationship building blocks have no place in longer term relationships."