Finding Cupid’s arrow, wherever it points

Each fall semester, the pleasantly warm weather and the crisp, autumn air that will hopefully soon follow complete the picture of couples on our main quad, strolling across the grass hand-in-hand. Yet, year after year, many Duke students find themselves hanging back from a seemingly inescapable dating scene of hook-ups. This failure to create and participate in a less hook-up oriented dating culture is ironic considering nearly three-quarters of students expressly want to be dating more. While the Duke Social Relationships Project study that generated that figure is almost two and a half years old, its findings still ring true today in conversations about dating. The fact is that there is a tragic miscommunication and misperception among students, a coordination problem with solutions that simply require courage to make your own spaces for relationships. Curiously, we will find this means something different than just moving away from hook-up culture or any other form of relationship.

In recent years, dating platforms such as Tinder have gained traction among young people, partially because finding a committed relationship in the midst of a rampant hook-up culture can be difficult for those who have not already found them. And yet that is not the whole story. Finding any kind of relationship, hook-up, committed or otherwise is difficult or at least intimidating because students have often not really considered what they are looking for. In any kind of romantic endeavor, we urge students to continue pursuing healthy relationships, rooted in open, honest communication, but today we focus on the idea that the hook-up culture to be our greatest barrier to finding love on campus. It seems the accusation explains only a fraction of the hindrances.

It is true the hook-up culture is discouraging to those pursuing more traditional relationships, but the two are not mutually exclusive. If we view relationships as a combination of variably intense sexual and romantic desires, hook-ups limit our view of relationships to be predominantly sexual in nature. A low romance, high sexual drive combination is the loudest relationship phenotype on campus, damaging those looking for some other combination. On the other hand, the contrasting ideal of a “traditional” dating paradigm is limiting as well.

Many contrast the hook-up culture with “boy meets girl,” but this heavily stigmatizes the hook-up minority, which is not always an unhealthy kind of relationship. If it is one or the other, we lose the goal of encouraging healthy relationships of any coordinate of romance and sexual drive. This dichotomy also undermines the multi-dimensional view of relationships outlined above and the asexual or aromantic who may struggle in a climate that emphasizes at least some of either desire. In other words, relationships do not have to be labeled as hook-ups or as traditional to exist and to be healthy. We urge students to avoid picking between the popular coordinates of romance and sexual drive and to instead seek out their neighbors on the corresponding graph and healthy authentic connections.

Those who desire more dating at Duke exist in the majority, and our greatest failure is in not knowing who we are looking to date. The prevailing hook-up culture should not overshadow important discussions on commitment and vice-versa. We maintain that if the three-quarters of students who desire more dating broaden their conceptions of love beyond the oversimplified choice between hook-up and commitment, they will be more successful in finding it at Duke and happier for it.