If you’ve ever had a casual sexual experience with someone, taking part in what our moms’ therapists are now calling “hookup culture,” you’re at risk of never finding love. This is according to Towson University English professor Andrew Reiner, who believes hooking up and hanging out leads to the inability to express intimacy.
In a piece for the New York Times, Reiner cites a report by the National Marriage Project, which found that, on average, women are waiting until they’re 27 to get married, while men are waiting until 29. The report said people are beginning to view marriage as a “capstone” on their lives rather than a “cornerstone.”
Reiner does not argue against the decision to establish oneself in a career before getting hitched, but warns that those who engage in emotionless sex, may have trouble expressing emotion when the time is right. He cites author Donna Freitas who, claims millennials are the “first generation in history that has no idea how to court a potential partner, let alone find the language to do so.”
Reiner says casual relationships eliminate emotional vulnerability # what he touts as the “golden rule” to making marriage and love work.
But do casual relationships really make one less vulnerable? What’s more emotionally tolling than engaging oneself in a series of relationships where love and intimacy are so variable?
Reiner discusses how feeling the need to “play it cool” in hookup culture leads to a fear of vulnerability and causes one to become devoid of emotion.
The desire to “play it cool” in order to not freak out a potential romantic partner by seeming needy is, admittedly, completely backwards. But if anything, trying to feign a blasé attitude toward sex leads one to become even more vulnerable.
Hookup culture can be destructive, but there’s more to it than what Reiner describes. Young people are not taking longer to settle down because they don’t know how to express the proper emotions. We have not lost our ability to properly seek a romantic partner and our courting practices are not ineffective. They’re just different.
The world is changing and so is the way we date.
Reiner claims millennials are the first generation ever that will need to be taught how to love. The 20- and 30-somethings of today # of the most liberated and open-minded generation ever # are the ones who don’t know how to express an emotion as uninhibited as love. Not our grandparents who got married at 18 to hide an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, or their parents who got to hold hands on the front porch a few times before tying the knot, or anyone else in our families who married for money, prestige or the approval of society.
It’s us. We’re the ones who are incapable of love. Our generation, which has more decision-making power about our own futures than any other before us, is the one that needs help. If you haven’t caught the tone yet, boy is that ironic.
Reiner’s solution is education. Not sex education (we get enough of that in middle school gym class), but education on how to love. Because, apparently, that’s teachable.
He suggests colleges offer classes about love on topics such as the biology of intimacy, the multicultural history of courtship and the psychology and sociology of vulnerability. USF St. Petersburg offers something similar in its course “Sex in Today’s World.” The class is popular, especially among giggling 18-year-old freshmen. But it’s not a rulebook for love, and should never evolve into one. The idea of being taught how to experience an emotion from a textbook is disturbing, dystopian even.
Reiner makes valid points in his case. But he, and the professionals he references, are lacking one major credential # they’re not millennials, they’re not growing up in the same world we are.
And, really, how much better were things 20 to 30 years ago? Was dating life that much simpler? Were things easier because everyone was afraid of sex and married out of fear of being shamed? If so, why are half of our parents and grandparents divorced?
Hookup culture does have potentially negative implications, but it also opens doors for our generation. We’re not restricted to experiencing sex within the confines of an intimate relationship. We can engage without being in love, and doing so isn’t going to hinder our abilities to find love in the future. Our tactics have flaws, but in looking back at previous generations, we’re doing it better than anyone else (and having more fun).
