You Can Kiss Dating Goodbye (Part 2)

In the last article, we mentioned a report about attitudes and behaviors of American college women regarding their relationships with men. The practice of hooking up — a sexual encounter with no expectation of commitment — has become widespread. 

Not everyone is hooking up. In fact, most college women are not. But the practice and acceptance of hooking up (whatever that means, and the vagueness is often deliberate) has profoundly impacted the social climate.

At the other extreme, many couples are joined at the hip.  They act as though they are already married.  They spend all their free time together, sleep together, do laundry together.  They fall into this arrangement very quickly, perhaps just a few weeks after they first meet.  Despite the intensity of the relationship, the M-word never seems to come up.  “Marriage is for old people,” they tend to think.

Before they know it, someone gets seriously hurt.

The vagueness of male-female interactions, especially in the coed dorms, is a source of constant confusion and tension.  Where is the relationship going?  No one knows. Even worse, they don’t want to talk about it.

Well, maybe the girl wants to talk about it. But the guy deinitely does not.

The lack of assertiveness of the college male is a well documented phenomenon. He no longer asks women out on dates. He is eager to have sex, of course, but he won’t come clean about his intentions unless a woman forces him to.

Is this what romance is supposed to be?

Here are more findings from the report.

6. “Dating” carries multiple meanings for today’s college women. We found four widely used and different meanings for the term, two of which were more common. A college couple who is “dating” is sometimes in a fast-moving, highly committed relationship that includes sexual activity, sleeping at one another’s dorm most nights, studying together, sharing meals, and more, but rarely going out on “dates.” These fast-moving commitments and hooking up operate as two sides of the same coin. At the same time, “dating” is also often synonymous with “hanging out,” in which women and men spend loosely organized, undefined time together, without making their interest in one another explicit, unless they hook up, at which point dating and hooking up become the same thing.

7. College women say it is rare for college men to ask them on dates, or to acknowledge when they have become a couple. Only 50 percent of college women seniors reported having been asked on six or more dates by men since coming to college, and a third of women surveyed said they had been asked on two dates or fewer. Young women and men more often “hang out” rather than go on planned dates, and if they live in a coed dorm, their dorm is where they most often meet members of the opposite sex. They report that because they can hang out or hook up with a guy over a period of time and still not know if they are a couple, women often initiate “the talk” in which they ask, “Are we committed or not?” When she asks, he decides.

8. College women from divorced families differ significantly from women who grew up in intact families regarding marriage aspirations, getting advice from parents, and hooking up. Women from divorced families appeared more eager to marry, and wanted to marry sooner, but were less likely to believe that their future marriages would last. They were also less likely to report that they were raised with firm expectations about relationships with men, and less likely to report that their parents had told them to save sex for marriage. They were more likely to have hooked up, and if they did hook up, were more likely to have done so often —of women who had hooked up at least once, 37 percent of college women whose parents had divorced reported hooking up more than six times, compared with 23 percent of women from intact families.

9. There are few widely recognized social norms on college campuses that help guide and support young women in thinking about sex, love, commitment, and marriage. College women say they want to be married someday, and many would like to meet a future husband at college. Yet it seems that virtually no one even attempts to help them consider how their present social experience might or might not lead to a successful marriage, or how marriage might fit with other life goals.

10. As a result, the culture of courtship, a set of social norms and expectations that once helped young people find the pathway to marriage, has largely become a hook up culture with almost no shared norms or expectations. Hooking up, hanging out, and fast-moving (“joined at the hip”) commitments are logical, though we believe seriously flawed, responses to this disappearance of a culture of courtship. The options available to college women are obviously strongly influenced by choices that other young men and women make, but each young woman today tends to see her choices as wholly private and individual. For example, while most college women expect to marry for life and 88 percent would not personally consider having a child outside of marriage, 87percent agree that “I should not judge anyone’s sexual conduct except my own.” Consequently, when women are hurt or disappointed by the hook up culture, they typically blame themselves.

Perhaps you are thinking, “These women are making their own choices. If they get hurt, it’s their own fault.”  Really? 

Who is to blame for this state of affairs?  The girls?  The guys? Everyone? No one?

The answer may surprise you.  Stay tuned.  We shall continue.

Source of photo: www.christianphotos.net