The Cowardly Lion: Men and Hookups at IC

Given the current culture of binge-drinking and binge-dating, it is not uncommon to have a intimate or sexual encounter with someone and never see or hear from them again. Even on a campus as small as IC, you can easily hook up with someone over the weekend and forget their face by Monday. But in this culture of easy come, easy go, how much contact after the act is too much—and how much is too little?
 
We’ve all been in these situations: you’re out with your friends, dancing and having fun, and some cutie is giving you the eye. You go over talk to him, or woo him with your sweet moves on the dance floor, and one thing leads to another. Before you know it, you find yourself smack-dab in the middle of steamy hookup, whether it’s tongue-tangling or a little more. And that’s all good fun. But what happens afterward?
 
I recently had a similar experience at a party. I thought the boy was quite cute, so I gave him my phone number in the hope that he felt the same and would text me within the next week asking to hang out. Unfortunately, no such luck; and what’s worse, when I saw him around campus, he tunnel-visioned me! Although my friends assured me he was just a spineless butthead, I couldn’t help but wonder—wasn’t I being just as cowardly by not contacting him first?
 
I was bummed and a little embarrassed by this turn of events, to say the least. Although I can’t deny that I’ve wanted to ignore a boy or two before, I’ve always followed-through on my hookups (random or with friends) with some sort of conversation, pre-relationship break-up text, or the like. The only exceptions are when I never hear from the boy first. So who’s really to blame for the cowardliness here: me, or the mystery men of my make-out past?
 
Searching for the answers, I asked a friend of mine for advice. She told me that there’s always some mental gymnastics involved in trying to decide whether to contact that hottie from the party or play along with his I-don’t-know-you act. “You ask yourself, are we going to hook up again, and when, and there are all these what ifs.” What would she do if a guy she hooked up with pretended not to know her, or never attempted to contact her? “I think that if they don’t really talk to you I would just act like it didn’t happen. I would just act normal, but I would feel really hurt.”
 
This reaction of feeling rejected but wanting to save face nonetheless is considered perfectly normal, even respectable: we women are supposed to suppress our feelings, just so we don’t make it awkward for the guy. But can it really be just us? Or do men feel this same insecurity?
 
So I turned to an expert—my best guy friend. I was saddened, but not a bit shocked, by his answer. “Hookups are just physical, so you don’t need the communication afterward. That’s the point.”
 
All things considered, there is a communication breakdown happening between the men and women of our generation. We’ve created a culture for ourselves where it’s perfectly alright to know someone in the biblical sense but pretend to not know them in the cafeteria. And to be honest, I don’t think we can just blame the guys for being a little lame—after all, for every cowardly dude out there, some dudette is mimicking (or going along with) his behavior. Perhaps the best thing to do to prevent these sticky situations is to just bite the bullet and open up the phone lines—even if it’s just to say, “let’s pretend this never happened.”