Claire Capozzi - "Hooking Up"

Hooking Up

            Being in college, “hooking up” is a popular, in-your-face thing. Almost every weekend, I’m incidentally hearing campus gossip of who did the walk-of-shame that morning or who was found crying in a bathroom in the 7’s. Excuses like being too drunk or rebounding after a bad breakup are often given, as a disclaimer. “I was so drunk—I don’t remember anything.” Because even though “everyone is doing it,” no one wants to risk getting a reputation.

            Something I’ve noticed, in almost everything we’ve read so far, was that there was always some type of commitment. Even if one or both parties didn’t want to be in a relationship—or sometimes a marriage—they still stuck around like we see in Madame Bovary. Even if both are miserable, even if they’ve gotten into a fight, they remain together. With hook ups, though, the commitment part is absent. In fact, this is what the whole act is based on. There’s still the idea that satisfaction could be reached and that two people can experience extreme intimacy for a few hours and then they never have to speak to each other again.

            Yet, at the same time, we see some similarities between hooking up and what we’ve read in class. In Celestina, the couple met and fell in love quickly. Although it could be argued that they weren’t actually in love because they barely knew each other, they still were quick to jump into bed together—like hooking up. Again, though, the only difference is that even in Celestina, where the encounter was brief, both parties still made a commitment to stay with each other, to eventually get married and to carry out a life together. And still again, in The Bad Girl, the “good boy” was ultimately with the “bad girl” the entire time. He would go back to her as long as she was willing to keep coming back to him and the intensity of feelings and intimacy was still there.

            Another difference between all these relationships and hooking up is that there are no feelings involved with this hook up culture. At least, there shouldn’t be. We see this play out in movies and even closer, on college campus, making this the mainstream. By conflating sex with love thus creating hooking up from what we’ve seen previous, and to make commitment a taboo instead of the norm, we’ve made an entirely new culture which is strikingly different from what we’ve been reading but still somewhere in the back of my mind all throughout class.