hooking up

When I started writing this blog for a class, its main focus was on hooking up. I really like that I expanded my horizon to look at other issues facing women but I want to center myself back on the idea of hooking up a little bit. I think it is a really important phenomena that is facing adults – young and old. As a college student, I know that I certainly live in an environment where hooking up is the norm. It is an acceptable thing for a male or female to go out on a Saturday night with the goal of finding a short term companion. Not only is this not in the game plan for an older, single person, it might not even cross their mind that this is the reality for young people today.

We have to accept that casual hooking up is a norm in many young adults’ lives, but I think it is really worth looking into how our society evolved into this. Literary and media examples of hooking up flood my life. I can turn on my television and see Chuck Bass from Gossip Girl with his lady of day or pick up my newspaper and read The New York Times’ Modern Love College Essay Contest winner’s account of her college hook ups and “relationships.”

It’s worth seeing how these hook-ups affect our lives. We can learn from these media examples, from essay accounts of young men and women, and maybe even self-reflection.

Is this really a new phenomena? Or is talking about it what is actually new?

So tell me everything I already know about you

One of my favorite Sunday activities is to read the weekly essay for the Modern Love article in the Fashion & Style section of The New York Times. One of the reasons that I started reading about it was after hearing about the college Modern Love essay competition.

This week’s essay is “So tell me everything I know about you” by Joanna Pearson. She recounts what happens when after meeting a guy in a bar, she goes home and googles him. She finds out all sorts of regular details about his life: that he can run a 3:59 mile, his college GPA, a few of his published articles, etc.

This was particularly interesting to me because as computer savvy people who wouldn’t know what to do without Google, college students are prone to this problem. We live in a world where facebook is an addiction and we can learn someone’s favorite movie/book/music and stalk their life through photos way before we get to meet the person.

I think that Pearson makes a great point in urging people to let relationships develop naturally. We should be able to learn details about a person by talking to them, not by reading about them on a computer screen.