Romanticizing Hookup Culture: A Hopeless Romantic’s Thoughts On One Night Stands

Most of us want to fall in love at some point. All of us (or at least most, I hope) are familiar with the great romances of Titanic and Pride and Prejudice, both epic tales of sacrifice, tragedy, and true devotion. Funny enough, however, the vast majority of us have instead been ghosted, ignored, and avoided. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m much more hopeless than romantic these days.  

The Struggle

For many Pinterest wedding planners, the prevalence of hookup culture and one-night stands subverts everything we have ever been taught about love. Those of us who have grown up reading, watching, and hearing about great romances, those who lay awake in bed wondering if there really is someone out there for us, we simply aren’t built for lives full of Snapchat rosters and Hinge, even if we have been forced to adapt to it.

Even though these great loves may have always been two-dimensional, reserved for the pages of a book or the pixels of a screen, reality seems to stray further and further from even the basic concepts of romance. Meeting people through a phone, one-night stands, and Netflix and chilling all lack that connection that now seems to exist only to drive every romantic into the arms of yet another frat boy or chronic mansplainer. How have we been so set up for failure? 

Is it really just our generation?

Jack and Darcy have set our expectations high for our romantic partners, but is that really who is to blame? I think it is more than simply a proclivity towards unrealistic love stories. Our parent’s generation and the one before it seemed more real, more driven by the desire to form connections. This is not to say that there weren’t F-boys thirty years ago, but their numbers seem to have exponentially increased. 

Casual sex and hookups aren’t in themselves new concepts, but the National Library of Medicine outlines, “‘Hookups,” or uncommitted sexual encounters, are becoming progressively more engrained in popular culture.” This new proclivity towards commitment-less sex has some positives, like lessening the negative stereotypes about casual sex for women and queer people specifically. But is this at the cost of meaningful connection? Perhaps not entirely.

How is this Changing our Perception of Love?

How are we supposed to keep up hope for a romance like The Notebook when every other interaction comes in the form of a “wyll” chat? Michigan State University’s Dr. Denise Acevedo touches on this in her project “Hookup Culture,” stating, “Key points my team made about the psychological element are that hook up culture is ruining our generation’s ideas of sex, relationships, and romance.” She continues to describe how college students she spoke with reported ceasing to pursue long-term romantic relationships because the prevalence of hookup culture caused them to conform to the norms of casual sexual relationships. 

Curious to see if UCSB’s students would disprove her research, I asked around in my circle of friends. The responses were overwhelmingly supportive of Acevedo’s results. When I discussed my struggle of being a romantic in hookup culture with a friend, the first thing she said was “Relatable.” I asked my friends who are strongly opposed to getting into relationships for their reasoning, and alongside their staunch belief in maintaining their independence, they cited a lack of interest in “people at this school.” All of us were aware of UCSB’s party reputation, but when I started poking around, I found that it was UCSB’s reputation for hookup culture that put most of my single ladies off of looking for love.

So not only is the lack of desire for an emotional connection an issue generally, but those of us attending schools with a reputation for its students’ proclivity for casual sex are stranded further away from romance.

Is the only solution time travel?

So should we do as Claire in Outlander did and hope to be transported to a time, fictional as it may need to be, to find a person worth letting our jaded walls down, or should we simply let our standards fall further than they already hang? I think neither. It would be a sad world if love ceased to be a conceivable ending. 

Even though things seem dire now, that doesn’t mean that the only way to avoid ending up alone is to settle with someone who doesn’t check every box for you. In the least cliche way possible, don’t settle. It may take years for the Snapchat and Tinder warriors to get sick and tired of ghosting and keeping everything on the DL, but in the meantime, keep having chick flick nights and reading Jane Austen.

• #hopeless romantic
• #romance
• hookup culture
• love