Hook Ups Will Leave You Hungry

Many young women think that hook ups with dudes they can’t stand sober is a great way to save time and energy while staying focused on career goals. Fact is, hooking up will leave you hungry–especially if it’s with a guy you wouldn’t care to share a meal with.

Kate Taylor’s piece in the New York Times (“Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game Too”), caused quite a stir when she put a sexy new slant on hook-up culture: That it’s the women, not the men, who are driving the trend. Of course, we’ve always believed it was the men who abhor commitment and would prefer casual sexual encounters than anything more serious.

Taylor cites young coeds like the “slim, pretty junior” at University of Pennsylvania who, like many other of her cohorts, relies on booty calls to get her needs met. Not because courtship is dead, or because she can’t find anyone, but because she doesn’t have time. She uses a rather chilling cost-benefit analysis and “low-risk and low-investment costs” approach to hooking up. She figures, in her estimation, that hooking up is just a smarter use of her time, so she can focus on what she’s there to do: Invest in her future, in her career. A husband and kids, she assumes, will come later.

So is it somehow better or okay if it’s women who would rather pluck the low-hanging fruit (so to speak)?

Nope. And the reason is simple: Hooking up cannot replace or come close to fulfilling the human need for real connection.

It doesn’t make you better, smarter, or stronger to avoid connection and intimacy. It doesn’t level the playing field in any real way. It purports that a woman must choose between meaningful relationships and meaningful work. You’ll be better off watching sites like hdpornvideo.xxx
and having your own fun than being left disappointed when your hook up leaves. This flawed belief doesn’t you up to be better or happier than the women who came before you. It just sets you up to be disappointed in a different way.

Do you need to scramble to find a life-long mate before you graduate college? Hell no. You shouldn’t even think of getting married until your career is well underway and you’ve had a few relationships behind you—enough to know what you want and don’t want.

But while concentrating on earning your Mrs. degree is narrow-minded, the reverse is just as bad: to pretend that you don’t need any relationships at all—or, that when you do, you’ll know what you want when you decide you want one.

That’s like saying you can run a few sprints today and you’ll be able to run a marathon a year from now. Or, perhaps more to the point, that you can sustain yourself on bags of chips for the next 40 years. Snacks hold you over; meals nourish. You may have several great such meals over the course of your life. But to say you’ll live on power bars and pass on dinner—forever—is to deny yourself the very thing you’re wired to do: Connect with another human in an intimate, real way. Hooking up as a long-term strategy, with zero connection or attachment, is like trying to sustain yourself on empty calories. That’s a lifetime of hunger pangs.

Read full article here, originally published on yourtango.