MATING BEHAVIOR 101: From Newsweek

It was just after sunset on a warm day at the College of New Jersey. Under a rising moon, the soccer team ran the field in the lighted stadium. Outside the student union, a guitar duo played an acoustic set. And in a dormitory lounge, 27 freshmen sprawled on couches as psychology professor Elizabeth Paul quizzed them about their sex lives. There was hardly any talk of "dating" or "boyfriends" or "girlfriends"--this is 2004, not a rerun of "Happy Days." Instead, the students and the professor talked about "beer goggles" and what happens when partners "catch feelings." Even as freshmen these students know enough about "hooking up" to hold forth for more than an hour. As they dished, Paul scrawled in her notebook. Their musings may contain the spark for her next big research project. ...

The early research confirms just how widespread the behavior has become. In 2000 Paul published what colleagues credit as the first academic article that explored college hookups in depth. Her survey of 555 undergrads found that 78 percent of students had hooked up, that they usually did so after consuming alcohol and that the average student had accumulated 10.8 hookup partners during college. Studies on other campuses produced similar numbers. Researchers at James Madison University found that 77.7 percent of women and 84.2 percent of men had hooked up, a process they said routinely involving "petting below the waist, oral sex or intercourse." At the University of Michigan, more than 60 percent of students reported hooking up; they said that a typical hookup more often included "genital touching" than "a meaningful conversation." ...

Those sentiments weren't apparent in Paul's focus group last week, probably because the students had just arrived at college. The group's more vocal participants happily discussed their motivations and the emotional fallout of their high-school hookups. Some said hookups often left them feeling lousy--especially if they'd suffered beer goggles (in which drunkenness led them to a substandard partner) or if one hookee caught feelings (meaning they became emotionally involved). When Paul asked how they defined a "good hookup," one young woman quickly answered: "When no one finds out about it or talks about it later."

Now that early studies have quantified the frequency of and sex practices that take place during hookups, researchers are becoming more interested in the emotional aftereffects. Some researchers are doing longitudinal studies that follow the same students from freshman year onward, to see how their attitudes change. For her current research Paul is asking more questions like "Do you think your hookup experiences are going to help you be a good relationship partner someday?" The students don't really have an answer.

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