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Hooking Up, Hanging Out and Hoping for Mr. Right: College Women on Mating and Dating Today

An Institute for American Values Report to the Independent Women's Forum.

  • What do college girls mean when they say "I hooked up last night?"
  • Whatever happened to dating?
  • Are there any generalized norms and socially prescribed practices that help young women think about sex, love, commitment, and marriage?
  • Do college women want to get married?
Report Excerpts:
What do college girls mean when they say "I hooked up last night?" (From the chapter Hooking Up)
"On most campuses today there is a widely recognized practice, usually called "hooking up," that explicitly allows sexual interaction without commitment or even affection ... Hook ups can occur between two people on just one occasion, or they can occur more than once between the same two people over a period of weeks or months. The most common definition we heard was that a hook up is anything 'ranging from kissing to having sex," and that it takes place outside the context of commitment."
Whatever happened to dating? (From the chapter, Joined at the Hip or Hanging Out, and Little In Between)
"... probably few parents or older adults are aware of how extraordinarily different 'dating' is today. In our on-campus interviews we found that no term for interactions between college women and men holds more ambiguity, and reflects more confusion, than the word 'dating'. Indeed, there are at least four separate ways that the word is used ... A UC-Berkeley student observed, 'There really is not much ... dating it's like people either just start hanging out together and live together and they are boyfriend and girlfriend. Or, they just like do random hook ups and whatever and go into relationships.'"
Are there any generalized norms and socially prescribed practices that help young women think about sex, love, commitment, and marriage? (From the chapter, When Courtship Disappears)
"In the on-campus interviews we found that many women, usually independently, were struggling to articulate rules and expectations that would help them to make sense of the prevailing confusion. Some women were clear that more rules were needed, such as a sophomore at Colby College who said, 'Hooking up ... I think its okay for people to do that if that's what they want. But I also think that like rules should be laid out in the beginning.' Other women may not have recognized that they were looking for 'rules,' but they nevertheless cited specific procedures or advice that they tried to follow in their interactions with the opposite sex."
Do college women want to get married? (From the Chapter, Marriage)
"We were surprised to discover the strength of the marriage aspirations of today's college women ... a significant number of women told us that they thought college, in theory, should be a good place to meet a husband, but many also observed that it does not seem to be working out that way."
Should 'Grown-Ups' Care About the Mating of the Young? (From the chapter with the same title)
"Throughout history, the mating of young adults has rarely if ever occurred in a vacuum, but instead has taken place in a thick nexus of social relations that included older adults who helped to influence young people toward good marital choices. Yet today, it appears that older adults, including college administrators and social leaders who have access to the young through education, media, health professions, and more seem largely to have withdrawn from this role ... whether they realize it or not, the decisions that college administrators and others make have a strong role to play in shaping a campus culture and thus helping to determine the environment in which young women and men meet and mate and perhaps consider marriage."
This report is based on original research conducted by the Institute for American Values' 16-member Courtship Research Team, led by Norval Glenn, professor of sociology at the University of Texas, and Elizabeth Marquardt, an affiliate scholar at the Institute.