Life with Gracie: Do college students prefer hookups?

The findings, by Kuperberg and Joseph E. Padgett, a doctoral candidate at the University of South Carolina, are being published Friday in a briefing paper titled “The Date’s Not Dead After All: New Findings on Hooking up, Dating, and Romantic Relationships in College” for the nonprofit Council on Contemporary Families, which works to enhance the national understanding of how and why families are changing, the challenges they face, and how to address them.

Kuperberg said about 62 percent of college students reported having hooked up, while 61 percent said they had gone out on a date. Only 8 percent of all students had hooked up without ever going on a date or being in a long-term relationship. More than three times as many students — 26.5 percent — had never hooked up at all, but instead had dated and/or formed a long-term relationship.

“So while it is clear that hookups are widespread, dating is not dead,” Kuperberg said.

What she found surprising was this:

Men are more likely than women to say they want to have a long-term relationship (despite forming fewer than them), and more likely to want more relationship opportunities than they are a hookup. Less than half of all hookups involved sexual intercourse, and only a minority of those involved unprotected sex. But almost half of college students are binge drinking during hookups.

“We found that binge drinking decreased use of condoms,” she said.

It used to be college was that place where young women and their parents could count on finding a husband. Today, not so much.

Today building resumes and finding those coveted internships and community-service projects trumps finding even a boyfriend, not to mention a husband. That’s not a bad thing.

What I find troubling is so many college students engage in so-called hookups, casual sexual encounters outside a committed relationship that range from kissing to making out to all-out intercourse — without the emotional entanglement of a relationship, of course.

Kuperberg is less worried than I am about this, but she does admit that many students are using drinking to overcome their inhibitions, thus increasing the likelihood of getting pregnant. Plus, those who binge drink are more likely to hook up with people they don’t know very well and also more likely to regret the encounter.

This is why I found it interesting to read people were upset over new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines suggesting women of childbearing age avoid drinking any alcohol unless they're using contraception.

Some argued the recommendation reduced women to “incubators” and placed the blame for unwanted pregnancies solely on women.

Pregnancy is just one of the problems with this, but that's another column.

What was most surprising, Kuperberg said, was the fact that men want long-term relationships more than women.

“We did not expect to find that,” she said.

Who would? It’s certainly not what I’m hearing from the women I know.

Based on her findings, though, it’s true.

“We think the reason for this finding is that men who are still in college find it hard to form relationships because they aren’t financially established,” Kuperberg said. “There is lot of research showing women want to form relationships with financially stable men.”

Kuperberg and Padgett’s research found that black women are 43 percent less likely to hook up than white women, but equally likely to date and form long-term relationships while in college.

However, in part because they are less likely to hook up, black women are almost twice as likely as white women to never partner with anyone, whether dating, hooking up, or long-term relationships, while in college.

“Actually we found all women of color were less likely to hook up compared to white women, but there was no racial differences in terms of forming long-term relationships,” she said.

Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families and author of the forthcoming revised edition of “The Way We Never Were: The American Family and the Nostalgia Trap,” said, “Hookups may seem shocking to an older generation unaccustomed to such frankness, but this generation did not invent casual sex or one-night stands.

“In fact, most contemporary youth would be equally shocked by the panty raids on 1950s campuses, where men stood outside dorms shouting ‘We want panties. We want sex,’ and by the dating rituals of the early 1960s, where men pretended to be interested in a woman until they got her into bed, and then stopped calling.”

As with so many other changes in family life, gender relations, and sexuality, Coontz said it’s the incomplete nature of the change, not the change itself, that causes problems.

“Many students binge drink because they don’t yet feel comfortable having casual sex without courage from a bottle,” she said. “Women often fail to ask for protection because they don’t want a man they like to think they are too sexually calculating. The authors’ finding that students who receive nonjudgmental education engaged in safe sex is a lesson too many politicians have yet to learn.”

Ain’t that the truth?