Where does the romance go?
The consensus at Northwestern seems to be that no one has time for a relationship. It’s a somewhat unique spin on a phenomenon that has taken our generation hostage: hookup culture. It seems we have become shameless “finance bros,” perceiving intimacy as a quota to be filled instead of a rare and sacred experience.Â
We tell ourselves we don’t have the time, energy, or desire for a significant other. We make desire mechanical, impersonal, an act of closing the deal rather than an expression of closeness.Â
One of the goals of hookup culture, if not the primary objective, is to remove the feeling, care, emotionality, and overall vulnerability of intimacy to create something easier, more disposable, and focused on a more selfish version of pleasure.
But just as sexual desire is human nature, so is the need for romantic love. And when it seems everyone is telling us that dating is about conquering, not camaraderie, it begs the question: If hookup culture is fulfilling our physical needs, what’s fulfilling our emotional ones?Â
If hookup culture is fulfilling our physical needs, what’s fulfilling our emotional ones?
Carrie Bradshaw said it best: “If you loved someone and you break up, where does the love go?” Or, more topically: If you’ve fallen into the situationship-riddled trap that is hookup culture, where does the need for romance go?
the casual girlfriend & the situationship spectrum between rom-com and porno
This question first came to mind in Fall quarter, during lunch with a friend (the Charlotte to my Carrie, if you will). She’d been seeing this guy, and everything seemed to be going great: He was attentive, cute, and proactive. On the romance-hookup spectrum between rom-com and porno, all signs pointed to a cozy winter quarter of ice skating in the park.
But somewhere between dinner dates in Chicago and making it official, he drew the line: He told my friend that, having just gotten out of a long-term relationship, he was only interested in something casual.Â
But here’s where things got interesting. “Casual,” to him, didn’t seem to mean casual sex: It meant “casual” texting all day, “casual” date nights, “casual” hand holding… Though he made it clear there was no future for them, he didn’t want a casual hookup, but something else… a casual girlfriend?
emotional constipation & affection climax
Has hookup culture — and its favorite word, casual — infiltrated the very idea of a relationship? Today, we seem OK accepting sexuality as a need that can be transactionally fulfilled. But has that mindset of resisting closeness and fulfilling quotas gone too far? Are we casually hooking up not just physically, but emotionally, too? And why? Because we’re too busy or too cool to experience the vulnerability and closeness that come from real connection? Too scared to take the risk? Now that’s not exactly sexy.
Giving advice to my friend in that situation was eerily similar to giving advice to someone in a friends-with-benefits situation. A lot of the actual advice remains the same:
You deserve someone who wants you for you.
He’s using you to make himself feel better.
You can’t wait around for him to want you.
And that is how we came to coin the term “relationship void”. Situationships that exist to fill the relationship void are ultimately far more insidious than hookups to fulfill sexual desires. Maybe because we haven’t yet learned to identify them, or maybe because the relationship void is the last frontier before hookup culture markets a cheap knockoff for all forms of intimacy, not just physical. In other words, if hookup culture is where romance goes to die, what happens to the young romantic in each of us, itching to write love ballads and buy flowers?Â
the relationship void is the last frontier before hookup culture markets a cheap knockoff for all forms of intimacy
As soon as we found a name for this phenomenon, we started to see it everywhere: emotionally constipated romantics who want love without intimacy or connection. Men who didn’t want to be with you but wanted to prove they could, all while achieving an emotional climax.Â
For a generation, we’ve been set on convincing ourselves we can love without consequence or like without feeling. But at what point have we gone too far? When did we kidnap cupid and replace him with love bombing’s quiet, misguided cousin?
