Hooking Up : Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus Kathleen Bogle (general ebook reader .txt) 📖

dates. Instead, the pair hangs out in the dorms or meets up at a bar near campus with their friendship circle.

For alumni, dating someone means something entirely different. I asked Raquel, a 24-year-old alumnus of State University, to elaborate on this shift.

KB: What is the difference between hanging out and dating?

How do you know it’s a date?

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Raquel: When my [current] boyfriend . . . and I first got together, when we first started dating, he came to my apartment and picked me up. We went out on a date; he took me out to dinner and he brought me back and dropped me off. . . . I say:

“He takes me out on dates.” I don’t call it [“hanging out”]; he and I don’t hang out. But in college [people] hung out. We don’t do that anymore. [Hanging out] is something you do in college. It’s not something I do now.

KB: Why is it different from college now?

Raquel: In college . . . you don’t really have any money so you don’t go out and do nice things. [My current boyfriend] will take me out to very expensive, fancy restaurants and we sip wine and have a nice meal and then maybe rent a movie or go out to a movie afterwards. That to me is a date. Going to [a bar in college with a guy] is not a date. A date is when . . . a guy picks you up and takes you somewhere. . . . [In college] we really didn’t [go on dates] that much. We would just hang out at the apartment and watch movies or play games, drinking games, stupid things like that.

WHY THE SWITCH TO DATING?

Dating replaces hooking up as the primary script after college because the environmental factors that made hooking up easy on campus are no longer in place. The alumni I spoke with said that one major change since college was that they were no longer socializing in the “safe haven” of campus. During college, they felt as though they knew everyone and could trust them, even though most of their fellow classmates were technically strangers, particularly at larger schools such as State University. If a female student was at a bar or party and was interested in someone she did not know as a hookup partner, she would at least have a classmate who could vouch for the unknown person. In other words, everyone was a “friend-of-a-friend.” After college, this sense of familiarity is gone.

KB: [From what you have told me], hooking up seemed to be a common part of college. . . . And it seems that maybe [hooking up] isn’t common after college. Why not?

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Shana: I think, I know for me, it is hard to trust someone. I wouldn’t feel comfortable with a stranger. In college you felt so safe. Everyone knew one another. It was somebody’s roommate. It was [a] comfort zone. It was safe. “You want to go home and hook up with him, all right.” Because it is somebody’s roommate [or he] has a class with someone. Now it’s not that security or comfort zone you had in college. It’s kind of nice walking into somewhere in college and everyone knowing your name. . . . It is comforting. You don’t have that once you graduate. You are out there with all these new people. . . . I don’t trust people that easily. So, that is why I don’t hook up. [25-year-old alumnus of Faith University]

KB: So you really feel most comfortable [going on a date with someone] when it is that friend-of-a-friend connection?

Claudia: Yes. I think it’s easier because I have some kind of background. Otherwise it’s like: “I don’t know anything about this person.” Nothing.

KB: What are you concerned about if they are a stranger?

Claudia: I don’t know. I always think too much about things. I think of every worse case scenario. But I guess I am more comfortable if I know something about them. [Otherwise] there is not that level of comfort off the bat. [25-year-old alumnus of Faith University]

Female alumni were more cautious about going home with “strange men” than their college counterparts.2 During college, if a woman wanted to go home with a man to hook up, they could merely walk from one part of campus to another. After college, if a woman meets a man at a bar and she is interested in a hookup, she would either have to get in a car with the man to accompany him somewhere or the two parties would have to follow one another in separate vehicles to someone’s “place.” The men and women I spoke with indicated that women were very reluctant to do this. Thus, the postcollege environment presents logistical difficulties that do not merely make hooking up incon-venient, but actually serve to exacerbate a fear of strangers. Twenty-seven-year-old Stephen, an alumnus of State University, touched on this point.

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KB: Would you say that the hookup scene, as it was in college, doesn’t exist anymore?

Stephen: I think it has definitely died down a lot.

KB: Why do you think that is?

Stephen: Girls are reluctant to go home with just some random guy that they meet at a bar. . . . Now it is more along the lines of

[someone saying]: “If you are interested, here is my number, give me a call and we will go out sometime.” At first glance, it may seem that men still might want to hook up, but women are just unwilling because of their fear of strangers. While there may be some truth to this, it is not the whole story. In fact, alumni men also revealed concerns about strangers. Some indicated that dating was almost a screening