It is a late Friday night. Music is blasting. College students are mingling. People are hooking up.
College seems to be the place the hook-up calls home.
The term hook-up is no where to be found in a dictionary and its meaning is vague.
“I think it’s up to interpretation, but you don’t necessarily know,” freshman liberal studies major Tia Brandt said. “It can be from making out to having sex.”
However most people tend to agree that hooking up means making out, not having sex.
“There’s different words for different things,” junior communications major Joseph Valencia said.
He said something more like “I hit it” would describe having sex.
Some view hooking up as a fun thing to do and college is where fun happens.
“We go to school, we go to work, we go out and we just let loose,” Cal State Fullerton sophomore business major Paulina Diaz said. “You see someone you like, it’s natural you want to hook up with them.”
Others see it as a way to find out what type of person they want to date.
“I think it’s an experiment; you find out what you like,” Brandt said.
She compared hooking up to food, explaining that if you have never tried something then how do you know it won’t delight your taste buds?
“Hopefully one can find that one person who embodies everything you want,” Valencia said.
Drinking increases the chances of two people making out or even heading to the nearest bed or car. People loosen up and go with the flow.
“I try not to randomly hook-up with people while I’m drunk but that’s when it usually happens,” freshman business major Kevin Claeys said.
However, Diaz thanks alcohol for bringing her boyfriend and her together.
“I ended up drinking a lot and we hooked up. The next day I called him and we’ve been dating ever since,” Diaz said.
Both men and women play the hook-up game, yet men are applauded for the number of women they tally while women are generally shunned.
“(Women) are socialized to be relationship-oriented but that doesn’t mean we don’t have the same needs,” Adjunct Psychology Professor Dorie Richards said.
Many believe that women are the ones who get emotionally damaged by casual interactions with men, but this is not always the case.
Richards explained that both women and men can and do get hurt.
“We tend to think women will more because…we’re taught a lot more about the importance of relationships,” Richards said.
College students would generally prefer to be in a relationship than occasionally hook-up.
“I feel that (hooking-up) gets dumb and old,” sophomore business major Miguel Ruiz said.
“I just don’t hook up with anybody,” Valencia said. “I want to be persuaded into it.”
“Pursuit is the name of the game for a guy,” Richards said.
Hooking up is not a new phenomenon.
“It’s a new phrase for a normal part of life,” Richards said. “It’s more spoken about, because I think you could ask your grandmother and she could tell you about people who were doing that.”
Ginny Ceballos can be reached at gceballlos@ulv.edu.
