hookup

A few weeks ago a bunch of my girlfriends and I had one of those fabulous girl talk nights. Three of my friends are living together in a four bedroom apartment, and they have an extra in their room. And this particular random roommate is driving them nuts. They've been recommending I come over to meet her for a while now, so I finally did. We watched Glee, and afterwards all kind of ran into Janna's room and hopped on the bed for girl talk, minus the roommate. Made me feel kind of bad, but it's a hard situation when they don't trust her to be a part of the intimate girl talk we share.

Once we got in there, laughter exploded. EXPLODED. Janna's a psych major, and is currently taking a class called Human Sexuality. One of the books she has to read for the class is called Sex, Love, and Hookups. And the front of the book is a close up of a girl's back with a guy's hands unhooking her bra.

Well. Really. Throw five college girls in a room with a book like that and expect us to ignore it? I don't think so. We pounced on it and started reading aloud and laughing so hard we couldn't breathe. The book defined specifically what "fooling around" is -- how blow jobs can be considered "fooling around" but when sex is involved then it's considered "hooking up". When I read the words "blow job" out loud the random roommate went, from outside of the room, "OH. MY. GOD. WHAT are you TALKING about?".

Okay, we're all college girls. Such language is occasionally in our vocabulary. Her complete and total shock when anyone mentions anything minutely sexual is one of the reasons her roommates get frustrated with her.

But back to the book. One girl talked about guys hooking up to have more girls on their "tally". Guys apparently go to parties looking for different girls to add to their tally, while girls go to parties looking to hook up with the same guy over and over again so they can pretend they're dating. Like, instead of thinking of it as just going to a party, they think of it as going out with Mark or James or whatever. Drink a little(or a lot), have sex at the party or maybe bring them home first, and then don't plan on seeing each other til the next party, but the girl will feel like the guy loves her, and tell her friends he does.

Um, really? I don't think so. This is the kind of thing that drives me nuts. I feel like if you think hooking up means someone loves you, you should not be hooking up. I know there's love stories out there where people start out just fooling around and then wind up happily married, but really? What are those odds? 1 to 1,000,000? Realistically, you're going to get hurt. And it's going to suck. It makes me sad to think that there's girls who really feel that way.