Love in the time of hooking up

For young people, the trend is sex first, dating (maybe) later. Is this healthy?

Hooking up: making dating obsolete.
(Image credit: Corbis)

What is hooking up?

If you don’t know, then you’re probably at least 40. As any high school or college kid could tell you, hooking up refers to the phenomenon in which two people—who may or may not know each other well, or at all—get together for the express purpose of fooling around, often after a lot of drinking. (See below.) Hooking up can involve anything from kissing and heavy petting to oral sex and intercourse, but what all hookups have in common is that the physical involvement precedes an emotional relationship—if the latter develops at all. “In the dating era, students would go on a date, which might lead to something sexual,” says Kathleen Bogle, a sociologist at Philadelphia’s La Salle University. “In the hookup era, students hook up, which might lead to dating.”

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