Hooking up on campus
November 3, 2025 7:07 PM
Whether or not we actually do hook up on campus, we experience it indirectly through magazines and TV shows that star unrealistically good looking 30-year-old actors. We even learn about it in our classes. Angela Weaver is a psychology professor at StFX who focuses on “friends with benefits” relationships. One of the texts Weaver uses in her human sexuality course is Kathleen A. Bogle’s Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus. Bogle is a sociologist at LaSalle University. Her primary research focuses on college students and their sexual and dating habits. After interviewing students from two different colleges in the U.S., Bogle found many interesting stigmas related to hooking up on campus. Bogle found that students frequently overestimate the amount of sexual activity and the kind of sexual activity that their friends and peers are engaging in. When students believe that their friends are going farther sexually and more often, they sometimes alter their behaviour to try to fit in. This obviously gives way to a situation that can get out of control. Bogle’s book stresses that these perceptions are usually inaccurate. Bogle describes how relationships on campus have changed. She first discusses the dating era, which we have surpassed. In the dating era, students would go on dates, and hooking up would sometimes follow. We have entered a new era in on campus relationships where we hook up, and sometimes dating follows. Bogle’s book tries to help students understand how and why college students are acting this way. Weaver points out that Bogle’s research made a huge contribution to the study of relationships in college. According to Weaver, Bogle is “one of the first to say that all the researchers are getting it wrong.” “We keep studying dating but we’re totally old school. We’re not getting it. Students don’t date anymore; they have hook ups,” says Weaver. This insight made researchers revise their research pertaining to relationships of college students. It’s now clear that we are no longer in a dating era, and that relationships between university students rarely begin among people who have not hooked up with each other in some capacity before. There are many reasons for this. Weaver explains that university is a “unique and almost optimal environment to explore more casual relationships” for many reasons. Many students go away to university, are only at the school for eight months of the year, and plan to live in another city, or maybe even another country, after graduating. This kind of living situation is not usually conducive to long-term relationships. Also, the average age of men and women getting married continues to rise, so most university students are very far from thinking about finding someone to spend the rest of their lives with. This, of course, is added to the fact that campus is a small space full of people of approximately the same age living without parental supervision for the first time, and where copious amounts of alcohol are ingested. All of these factors make university the seemingly ideal place for hooking up. Weaver admits that she doesn’t think that hooking up “necessarily has to have negative consequences.” However, that’s not to say that there can’t be some serious consequences. Weaver describes her main concerns when it comes to hooking up. She believes that maybe “because of the way that men and women are socialized, unwanted sexual experiences are occurring or that maybe unsafe sex is occurring.” She believes that the consumption of alcohol makes these concerns come about even more often. When students are drinking, there’s a greater possibility that they will not feel comfortable saying no in a situation where they are uncomfortable, or they will forget to have safe sex or use protection improperly. Weaver says that these concerns are the “only reasons why [she] won’t say everybody should be trying this.” Fourth year human kinetics student Scott Hastings and third year biology students Carmen Pederson and Kasia Szczesniak all answered with a resounding “no” when asked if most students think about the negative consequences of hooking up on a typical night at the Pub. Pederson points out that many students “think the next day ‘Ah, why did I do that?’” but they don’t worry about that during the night when they’re drinking. Although it’s now a social convention to talk with friends about all of the mistakes that were made the night before, we should not let our attempts to fit in jeopardize our health. That being said, as long as hooking up is done responsibly, consciously and with the consent of the people involved, it can be a really good time.
