The Hook Up

NPR ran a story very recently on today's variation of the mating game. It's called a Hookup these days. My idea of a hookup today is getting speared by my cat. Accidentally, of course. (Really, I believe that!) The headline for the piece boldly pronounces: Sex Without Intimacy: No Dating, No Relationships. A lot of people in my Facebook world made comments that this article was not news. I think it is, and I think the dynamic between men and women continues to shift in amazing ways.

More and more people don't date, they hookup. Hookup is not a new term, and the acts of casual encounters are not new. With the 40th anniversary of Woodstock coming this August, and being a veteran of those fuzzy and furry moments of the 1960s and 1970s sexual revolutionary times, I can verify hookup is not new. What appears new is the growing detachment found now between men and women in social settings.

On an intuitive level this seems a natural progression of more women in the workplace, women outnumbering men in colleges, the growing numbers of the single parent and the decline of organized religion in our society. Given those social drivers and trends, women today can experiment with relationships on a level historically only reserved for men. Women can do so without the baggage of harassment that has typically come from the dual moralistic standards applied antagonistically by institutions aiming at keeping a rigid male dominated status quo.

This new hookup of casual encounters of the libido-driven-kind signals new social relationship patterns in a highly competitive world of commerce. Many post Woodstock single men and women looked to each other as potential economic partners fighting to gain a foothold in the business jungle of American life. Two incomes were needed to survive in increasingly expensive cities where jobs were located. As incomes increased for couples from the 1980s until 2000 these work-family couples were able to meet inflation demands of rising costs for goods and services and maintain a lifestyle of physical comfort.

This decade has undone financially much of what many of those post-Woodstock couples achieved. Wages have stagnated. Benefits have been lost, or have become too expensive to maintain at former accepted levels. Personal and real property values have fallen so low they have left many couples upside down and near total bankruptcy.

All this might be making an impression on young people today. You can catch a National Center for Health Statistics snapshot of the marriage and corresponding divorce rates for America at the provided link (NCHS). Fewer people are getting married these days. The graph in the cited NPR feature at the top of this blog shows that those who do get hitched are waiting a lot longer to do the deed.

Maybe another major factor in this new more casual hookup model of today, which bypasses many of the old dating rules, is that there are so many more kids who never left, or returned after a brief stay away from the nest. Could be the Peter Pan Effect, where kids never want to grow up and assume the responsibilities of being adults. In America there has not been a whole lot of specific data on boomerang kids, or never-left-the-nest kids, but the Baltimore Sun reported that multigenerational families in the US has grown 60% since 1990. There are numbers in Canada and Australia that indicate this is not just a US phenomena.

Economics also plays a big part in this return to the early 20th Century living realities where kids never leave, and three or four generations all reside in the same home. Money probably plays a huge part, as well, in the hookup. Who can afford numbers of dates that ultimately get nowhere? Being in a crowded nest might make also make getting too close too real for a lot of young people. Singles are much more likely to return to the nest over married couples, but even married couples in times like these have come back home to mommy and daddy.

When I was young the thought never crossed my mind to live as an adult with my parents. Horizontal boppin' is an amazingly difficult option with the parent(s) in the next bedroom. Who needs that? I also hated the hit and miss of going weeks without, after spending too many all-nighters in pursuit of getting into the Fruit-of-the-Looms. Ever had the flashlightus-interuptus in a rocking vehicle? Talk about deflation!

Of course, if video gamer action is what really turns a person on, then who knows how long this new hookup culture in a four generation house may last. Hookup might signal really big families of singles for this Boomer meets Gen-X and Gen-Y world.

Interesting possibilities. I guess we'll see how all this plays out. It really is what makes life interesting. You never know how things like this will turn out, much like a date.