One thing that has always been prevalent to me about "college culture" through pop culture, tv and film, is the idea of hooking up.
It is often portrayed as something that is uber common and practically an essential of leading a successful college social life and experience. This is unsurprisingly inaccurate.
Here at UConn, many other universities, and higher education programs, have started to offer a class, if not the major, named Human Development and Family Studies.
As a Psychology major, this pairs well and is often picked up as an easy minor or double major. I am in HDFS this semester and the first day of class, we were asked anonymously by our professor if we had ever "hooked-up". I was surprised by the preselected answer choices.
Before coming to college, I had never thought about it being anything besides a yes or no question. I honestly hadn't thought about the idea of it too much until I was sitting in class. Yes and no were options for the answer however, the third answer choice was not "maybe", it was "I'm not sure".
This brought up a very interesting follow up question and observation.
Over a third of the class said "I'm not sure". Why? That's the big question and it has an interesting answer.
The studying of relationships in human lives weren't really studied until the 1940's, so a lot of terminology is either new or undefined. Just like the term "hook up". What it actually means varies person to person.
At the same time, the idea of hooking up is usually universal thought as something taboo. But, how is something taboo if it can't even be defined? Some people define "hook up' as simply making out and others go towards one night stands or relationships like friends with benefits.
It's interesting that we can all mutually agree we don't like to talk about our possible sexual promiscuity, but can't land on a definition. Is it possible that it solely depends on our personal experiences with long-term relationships or a moral dilemma because you aren't "that type of person"?
I suppose it'll take a few more years to decide. However, when thinking your own personal experiences, it really does depend on what your comfortable with classifying "hooking up" as.
