By Valeria Vaquera
“Hookup culture refers to a culture built on the approved practice of engaging in hook-ups or sexual encounters between two or more individuals where it is understood that commitment, relationships, and emotional feelings are not expected outcomes.” -Encyclopedia
Most teenagers are getting lost in hookup culture causing them to keep chasing that physical excitement. Lust is purely sexual attraction while love is both passionate and compassionate.
Hookup culture is causing teens to get confused about what they are actually searching for. Teens want that feeling of having someone to love, having someone to share memories with at a young age, someone that they could grow up with. Although everyone around us tells us the love we have for our significant other isn't real or is “just a phase.” All of this I believe goes hand in hand with hookup culture.
Most teens never had the “bees and the birds'' talk with their parents. Sex was just something ignored by both the teens and parents, not talking about it allowed the teens to go on and discover it on their own with no knowledge of it. Usually, when they discover sex it becomes the most important thing in their relationship making it solely a sex-driven relationship. This is usually the part of the relationship where it tends to get “toxic” or “unhealthy.” Both of these teens want more, not knowing how to express their feelings toward one another. If we’re doing what everything else is doing this has to be right, right?
Hookup culture is also enforced usually by friends, sex isn't something that holds great value anymore, it's just something that everyone does for fun. So why not do it? According to the National Library of Medicine, both engaging in hookups and the number of hookup partners are related to greater symptoms of depression and anxiety. We engage in these sexual acts trying to find a thrill, but end up getting left with a greater void in us, where we end up feeling even more lonely at the end of it.
Senior Veronica Sedano states, “Hookup culture basically took up our generation, basically what our generation is known for is just hooking up and not taking people seriously, it’s sad. I also think it depends on how you were raised, if all you know is hookup then that's what you are going to be guided towards, if you don't know anything about actual love it would be really easy to get involved in that.”
Today I had an experience with one of my guy friends debating if sexual intercourse had meaning or not. The first time we had this conversation he was around his friend, and he kept disagreeing with me saying anything involving sex was not important to him. The second time we had the conversation alone he kept agreeing with me saying it was important to him.
I asked him why he would not speak up about his opinion of his friend, and he ended up telling me his friends have that hit-it-and-quit mentality. So in this generation, we have people afraid to let their supposed “friends'' know how they actually feel, and we have teens hooking up without strings attached leaving them feeling lonely at the end of it.
Is this really how we want to keep living as teens?