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Hooking Up, Part 2

Summer Recap

The long, sunny days of summer are gone. But I'm still thinking about the summer reading I did. You know — I packed my pool bag with sunscreen, sunglasses, some snacks and a water bottle. And for some light, entertaining reading, I threw in a good … sociological study. OK, I'm speaking tongue-in-cheek here. But seriously, I did spend several hours this past summer perusing Kathleen Bogle's book Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus.¹ It recounts and interprets the interviews Bogle conducted for her graduate work in sociology.² Basically, she spent six years getting college students to dish about romance on campus.

In my first article about Bogle's book, I described her M.O. and shared some opinions about the strengths and weaknesses of the book. I also brought up some questions that it raised for me. In light of today's anything-goes mentality about relationships, I believe it's imperative for Christ-followers to hammer out biblical responses (both philosophical and practical ones) to these dilemmas. If we don't, we're destined to look and act just like the world does when it comes to interacting with the opposite sex.

What's the Point?

One matter highlighted in Hooking Up is the aimlessness with which relationships are approached in the university setting. The setup for this lies in the fact that most of the women Bogle interviewed saw themselves marrying in their mid- to late-20s. The men imagined getting married in their late-20s to mid-30s.³ So realistically, no one is seriously looking for a spouse when they're flirting with a potential hookup partner. When I mentioned this in my previous article, I posited that it's a circumstance with "significant practical and moral implications." So let's talk about those.

Here's the biggest practical concern I can see with this situation: We've removed dating so far from marriage that it's no longer dating. It's just "hooking up." And that makes it necessarily shortsighted. If romance doesn't point toward marriage, what in the world can it point to besides itself? It becomes an experience for the sake of the experience. To illustrate the point, check out how Bogle's interviewees defined the word hook-up:

Kyle: "[Hooking up is] just kissing and maybe a little groping."⁴

Tony: "[Hooking up means] taking someone home and spending the night with them."⁵

Pretty temporal, huh? (Unless, of course, "spending the night" ends up producing offspring. Then the hookup has long-term consequences, but those are the kind of consequences that hooker-uppers try to avoid.)

Guys in Bogle's study were especially concerned with the immediate physical rewards of the hookup, and the girls on campus knew it. A student named Gloria opines that "… guys definitely look for the hottest girl and want to 'get [some]' from that girl and want to say they got it from that girl."⁶

Even though the women were more likely to want the hookup to turn into "something more," they didn't seem to think they could rightfully expect this during their university years. Says Marie, a senior,

I know relationships come and go and you never know what is going to happen. I mean [a relationship] would be nice … even if it was a year or two, like some stability, like you know, a possible marriage [partner], someone that you were close to and I could definitely see him as that.⁷

It's almost as if she's embarrassed to admit that she'd like to consider marriage. So she's willing to settle for a "long-term" relationship that lasts for a few years, which — like a hookup — becomes an experience for its own sake.

And here's where the moral question comes in: Have we, as Christians, allowed this mentality to influence us? Even if we're not participating in the hookup scene, have we completely separated romance from marriage in our minds? For that matter, what's the big deal if we have?

This big deal is that 1 Corinthians 7:9 seems to indicate that God gave us our sex drives in part to push us toward marriage. So even if we're not going as far sexually as our secular counterparts, we're still thwarting God's design if we're indulging ourselves physically with no thought of marriage. Instead, we should be keeping a tight reign on our sexuality until we can express it freely within marriage.

Everyone Else Is Doing It

My concern over whether we're imitating the world in motives — if not also in actions — stems from a larger concern raised by Bogle's book. Basically, college students don't have objective standards for their behavior. Instead of basing their actions on a deeply espoused code of ethics, college students base their choices on what others around them are doing.

Wait … even that's not exactly true. College students ground their choices on what they think others around them are doing. Bogle explains: "Despite students' interest in the sexual activities of their classmates, their perceptions of what is going on behind closed doors is often inaccurate."⁸ Still, she says, "It is important to find out how students view their classmates' behavior, because students define their own sexual behavior relative to others, particularly other students of the same sex."⁹ This seems to be true, even for students who call themselves Christians. (Remember, as I mentioned in the first article, many of the students Bogle interviewed were from a Catholic university.)

You may right now find yourself in a compromising situation, tempted to see yourself in light of what your hall-mates are doing sexually. ("I'm not so bad compared to him/her.") If so, please take a warning from Bogle: This relativistic method of setting standards leads students to take bigger risks than they otherwise would, including viewing virginity as something to be "gotten rid of" simply due to the perception that "everyone else" has already done so.¹⁰

Exceptions to this rule were rare, but one interviewee, Hannah, stands out. Bogle takes a moment to describe her: "Hannah believed her Christian faith was a central part of who she is and what she does; religion was not just another demographic category, something in the back of her mind. Rather, she possessed a very active faith; it was a central part of her identity and her daily activities." In Bogle's mind, this is the sole reason why Hannah had managed to set different standards for herself, escape the hookup world and pursue more "mature" relationships on campus.¹¹

I find it fascinating that Bogle, who doesn't claim to be a Christian, takes the time to point out what a difference a deep-running, life-changing faith can make. So as we consider how to order our lives as believers, it's important to remember that it's not only the tenets of our faith, but how much we actually allow God to invade our lives — in every area — that determines how we live.

Wrestling with Your World

I said before — and I think it bears repeating — that Bogle doesn't actually voice these moral and ethical questions in her book. She gives a straightforward report on the attitudes and actions she discovered on campus without editorializing much at all. (Only rarely does the ridiculousness of the whole hookup thing get the best of her, and then she ventures to question its saneness.)

C O F F E E  S H O P

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How do you think Christians have begun to imitate the culture when it comes to dating?

Join the discussion!

In my opinion, it's precisely the absence of built-in philosophical discussion that begs the reader to hammer out his or her own moral conclusions. In the end, that's our everyday duty as Christians — to take a look at any data the world presents us and ask ourselves what to make of it and what to do about it, from a biblical perspective. We'll do some more of that in the next (and final) installment of this series on Hooking Up.