Musings of an Inappropriate Woman

» Dating is serious, hooking up is sport and other sex delusions

This story over at NPR attracted a fair bit of attention on my Google Alerts last week, derivative as it was of Laura Sessions Stepp, that New York Times article, and countless other moral panic-inspiring media about young people’s sexual habits.

The general gist of the piece is that “hooking up” isn’t just something college and high school students do, but something people partake in all the way up to when they’re ready to find a serious partner (or, alternatively, find someone who inspires them to get serious). Like many others before it, it worries that without the practice of dating, young adults will be incapable of forming strong, lasting relationships when the time comes, opining:

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.

This state of affairs is positioned in stark contrast to the very serious affair of dating:

The expectation was that dating, as with courtship, would ultimately lead to a relationship, the capstone of which was marriage.

Except, well, no. It wasn’t. Young people in the 1920s and 1930s - when dating hit the US big time - may not have been allowed to have sex without reprieve, but in many ways they weren’t all that different from their contemporary counterparts. Check out what Willard Waller had to say about the college dating scene back in 1937:

Whether we approve or not, courtship practices today allow for a great deal of pure thrill-seeking. Dancing, petting, necking, the automobile, the amusement park, and a whole range of institutions and practices permit or facilitate thrill-seeking behavior. These practices, which are connected with a great range of institutions of commercialized recreation, make of courtship an amusement and a release of organic tensions.

Sound familiar? The college students of the 1930s, like the young people of today, were taught by their parents that partnering too early would limit their social and economic opportunities. Waller writes:

For the average college student, and especially for the man, a love affair which led to immediate marriage would be tragic because of the havoc it would create in his scheme of life. Nevertheless, college students feel strongly the attractions of sex and the thrills of sex, and the sexes associate with one another in a peculiar relationship known as “dating”. Dating is not true courtship, since it is not supposed to eventuate in marriage; it is a sort of dalliance relationship.

Much like hooking up today - the only differences are that we stay unmarried for longer and there’s not the same taboo against sex (and it’s worth noting here that three quarters of US college hook ups don’t end in intercourse, and around a third don’t get past second base).

Nor, as most young adults will tell you, are hooking up (or “making out”, as Jeff Schult pretty accurately translated it on Alternet) and relationships mutually exclusive: as sociologists Kathleen Bogle and Paula England have noted, hooking up is the main path through which young people enter relationships these days, just as dating was in the past.

In fact, you could view the lack of dates the research indicates young adults go on (and I thought it was just me!) as an indication we take relationships more seriously - most of us apparently only ask people out on a date if we’re really sure we’re interested (although this has its own set of potential downfalls, as I noted in CLEO back in January).

In the meantime, we’ve found better ways of getting to know people. (And if you follow the link, you’ll see I’m not talking about sex.)