MINTZ: Hooking Up is Hard to Do

Around 1 a.m. Sunday, I realized that I had lost one of my friends. Not lost in the greater sense, but just physically, in that moment, lost. One second, she was by my side at the party we were at, and we were attached at the hip, as we usually are on our nights out, and the next second, she was gone.

I barely even had time to process that she’d left before she texted me in complete gibberish to come get her. I did not think twice about this — sure, I was having fun, but arguably, my closest friend at this school was possibly in trouble, and my instincts were screaming at me.

As I write this, I’m looking back at the text messages she sent last night. Although I have absolutely no idea how I did it — she gave zero clues about her location — I found her. She had gone outside into the 50-degree cold to leave the party and grab some air and was standing in a small, graffiti-ed alleyway and crying. I texted my other two friends telling them that it was time to go as she wiped her tears away and told me that some guy she had likely not even spoken two words to brought her up to a secluded room and kissed her.

Nothing happened besides that, and the whole thing could not have lasted more than three minutes, but the experience was enough to shake her. She shouldn’t have to worry, she said, about someone trying to take advantage of her just because she decided to drink that night and that being at this party was not an automatic invitation to get in her pants.

Around an hour later, we all found ourselves back in our respective beds, and as I wrote down ideas for this column, centering around the events of the evening, a friend texted me screenshots of her text conversation with a boy. He had texted her at 1:30 a.m. asking if she was free, and she wasn’t. His response was — and I’m paraphrasing here — “I’m done wasting my time with trash…you were always a last-minute sub on my roster.”

These are two isolated events that just so happened to occur close together, and maybe Saturday night, there was a Boston area school-wide movement to be gross and disrespectful of which I was not aware, but regardless, these things don’t happen in a vacuum. Much like the arrogant boy who texted my friend (a boy I so wish I could use more colorful language to describe), I also have a roster of times my friends and even random people I’ve spoken to have been treated by someone in ways similar to those I just described. There are the true horror stories, of which I unfortunately have heard far too many, but then there are the more benign but still dangerous and insidious ways “hook-up culture” on college campuses affects us.

My roommate, whom I adore and I know will read this, is rather open about her near-addiction to the ubiquitous smart phone app Tinder. By nature of being on a college campus, we all know Tinder, probably more intimately than anyone would care to admit. It advertises itself as a way to make romantic connections, but it is really more often used as a way to find someone to hook up with or to find parties to attend. Match with a connected bachelor on Tinder, flirt a little bit and gain an instant entry to their Saturday night extravaganza. It’s a good system, and it works.

You often find nice people on the app who will even offer up their dorm or apartment for a pre-game. But my roommate uses it solely to find someone to hook up with, sometimes preluded by a dinner or coffee date, but more often not. She’ll come back to the room and tell me about her evening, or afternoon or early hours of the morning, with a smile but a kind of sad look in her eyes. When you talk to her, she’ll admit it: it’s a constant search for a validation that never really comes.

And perhaps that is the worst part of the culture we find ourselves embedded in: maybe we want something more, even something as casual and commitment-free as a coffee date, but nobody knows how to ask for it.

Kerry Cronin, a philosophy professor at Boston College (I know, shameful that I’m even bringing our rival up, but hear me out) teaches a class in which one of the assignments is to ask someone out on a date, because she found that so many college students do not know how. According to an article written in The Boston Globe on May 14, Cronin said that dating has been “supplanted on campuses by a hookup culture that can entail anything from kissing to having sex with strangers…rather than committed partners.”

Now, I am not arguing exclusively for monogamy, and I am not entirely against randomly hooking up — let’s be honest, we’ve all done it. It’s simple and often fun. But the idea of anyone feeling regret over something as supposedly natural as spending time (or “spending time”) with another person is something I’ve seen again and again in my time here.

It’s hard to be vulnerable to another person and allow your feelings to possibly get hurt, to hand over even the smallest piece of yourself to them and consider trusting them. However, the general social climate college hook-up culture creates and perpetuates is one that, in a broader sense, promotes something far more dangerous and lonely than the feeling after a night with someone unfamiliar. It is a game that, in the end, no one wins.