Oscar Wilde’s once said, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
Her Campus once said, “Casual sex is rarely pure and never simple.”
Casual sex: hooking up because both partners are attracted to one another but don’t have feelings or aren’t looking for anything serious. There are many synonyms: friends with benefits, no strings attached, booty calls, hit it and quit it, occasional lovers, the list goes on. What might start out as sex after a few nights out can turn into something that’s more convenient for both individuals: sex between class; sex in the morning; sex after The Bachelor…
The day before I left for college, my friend’s older sister told me to have fun in college, make lots of mistakes, and hook up with all the wrong people. College isn’t the time for making right decisions. Instead, it’s about focusing on new things and signing up for opportunities that you wouldn’t have tried before.
Before I delve into anything further, it’s important to note that whatever ‘new opportunities’ you explore throughout college, it’s always necessary to feel comfortable and confident with whatever you’re doing—whether it’s streaking the academic quad or just casually hooking up with the cutie from your stat class.
I soon realized that the advice to have fun and make mistakes could easily be accomplished at the same time and place: at a college party. When you’re asked, “do you wanna get out of here?” your answer and subsequent actions can easily fall into a gray area of labels. With the prevalence of no-strings-attached relationships on college campuses, one one-night-stand leads to another. Before you know it, you’re having casual sex, which is great while it lasts—just ask half of Bucknell’s campus- from the epic walk of shames and strides of pride across the quad the morning after to the incoherent booty call texts at 1:00 AM. Friends with benefits are inevitably worth it for the stories, however it is bound to fail. Although it sometimes might feel like it, Bucknell is not equivalent to Hollywood’s idea of the accidental romance. Although it’s easy to daydream about “what if’s” and happy ever after’s all day, it’s not realistic to end up in a relationship like the ones from No Strings Attached or Friends With Benefits. Although it’s convenient in the moment and seemingly simple, it doesn’t usually have the best endings.
Most college students are only looking for a one-night-stand, and the rest of us feed right into their selfish desires. The college hookup culture is, therefore, a vicious cycle; those who are searching for love end up pleasing those solely looking for lust. But the truth of the matter is that college is essentially a hookup game where few make it past the first level of random hookups and into the next level: dating. But that’s completely okay. College isn’t a smooth journey from start to finish, but rather, a winding road through failed relationships and hookups that never really took flight. But through faults and failure, we learn—and that’s really what we’re at college to do, right?
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