Hooking Up

PETACH TIKVA, Israel — Charles Blow real­izes what young peo­ple have, unfortunately, known for years:

It turns out that every­thing is the oppo­site of what I remem­ber. Under the old model, you dated a few times and, if you really liked the per­son, you might con­sider hav­ing sex. Under the new model, you hook up a few times and, if you really like the per­son, you might con­sider going on a date.

I asked her to explain the pros and cons of this strange cul­ture. Accord­ing to her, the pros are that hook­ing up empha­sizes group friend­ships over the one-pair model of dat­ing, and, there­fore, removes the neg­a­tive stigma from those who can’t get a date. As she put it, “It used to be that if you couldn’t get a date, you were a loser.” Now, she said, you just hang out with your friends and hope that some­thing happens.

The cons cen­ter on the issues of gen­der inequity. Girls get tired of hook­ing up because they want it to lead to a rela­tion­ship (the guys don’t), and, as they get older, they start to real­ize that it’s not a good way to find a spouse. Also, there’s an increased like­li­hood of sex­ual assaults because hook­ing up is often fueled by alcohol.

Since I am twenty-eight years old, I have had a foot in the dat­ing worlds of yes­ter­day and today. I must say that yes­ter­day is much bet­ter phys­i­cally, men­tally, and spiritually.

Emo­tional inti­macy used to come before phys­i­cal inti­macy. Now, how­ever, the oppo­site is true for peo­ple in the dat­ing scene. When I was a sopho­more in col­lege in Boston in 1998, I once told a friend that I was going out with a girl that evening. Her response: “You go on dates?” I didn’t know what to say; I did not know that an alter­na­tive even existed. (Per­haps it was because I was from the Midwest.)

The pri­mary rea­son that the hook-up cul­ture has a neg­a­tive effect on peo­ple is that it is impos­si­ble to sep­a­rate phys­i­cal inti­macy from emo­tional inti­macy com­pletely. Any­one who says that some­thing was “just sex” is wrong — even if they firmly believe it them­selves. In Jew­ish mys­ti­cal thought, the prism through which I view this par­tic­u­lar sub­ject, sex is a a spir­i­tual union in which two peo­ple become one. When a per­son has sex with count­less part­ners for years, his or her spirit will become increas­ingly frac­tured. This is why those who sleep around the most are usu­ally the peo­ple who are the most unhappy (although other psy­cho­log­i­cal fac­tors come into play as well).

When the hook-up cul­ture is com­bined with the addi­tional trend of mar­ry­ing later and later in life, the only result is a gen­er­a­tion of young peo­ple who are bit­ter and bro­ken. Although every bad rela­tion­ship and casual encounter teaches peo­ple lessons, it also dam­ages them emo­tion­ally and spir­i­tu­ally. How many times can a per­son have his or her heart bro­ken? More­over, girls who fre­quently engage in this behav­ior risk many future con­se­quences in addi­tion to preg­nancy and sexually-transmitted dis­eases — mainly, what respectable guy would marry some­one who was a “slut” for years?

The only “pos­i­tive” aspect that Blow’s inter­vie­wee describes is that hooking-up sup­pos­edly “removes the neg­a­tive stigma from those who can’t get a date.” Hog­wash. In every cir­cle of friends, every­one knows who gets to hook-up reg­u­larly and who does not. There is not a sin­gle good side to the hook-up culture.