Ryan Chartrand‘”Hooking-up” is the most confusing word to ever grace Cal Poly’s campus. To most people it means kissing, to others it means a little more than that and to some it means sex. To confuse matters more, hooking-up can also be some sort of dating term, like a precursor to an official boyfriend-girlfriend title. Or it may be used to describe a past semi-relationship that was never titled i.e. “Oh yes, we used to hook-up.” So how is a student to know the exact status of his or her hook-up?
To address this uncertainty I am going to attempt to define hooking-up for the betterment of Cal Poly. There should be one uniform explanation in order to unify our campus communication. To make this expression most efficient it should only be used for situations involving kissing and a little more. If you smooched someone while sleazy dancing, that’s all you did. You kissed. Don’t try to glorify it with a complicated description. Tweens do that in middle school, so quit confusing people by using the word hook-up.
Kissing and a little more sexual activity is the perfect opportunity to use ‘hooked-up.’ You did something more than kiss, but you didn’t have sex. This leaves a variety of options available, so instead of divulging details, you can simply, and appropriately say you hooked-up. In this context, it is used for convenience. It is much easier to say this catch phrase than give details about your quarter of a hand job and three-quarters of a blow job situation.
The big reason hooked-up should not be used for sex is because if you’re not mature enough to say it, you shouldn’t be doing it. Please don’t use an ambiguous phrase to describe a pretty clear act. It was in or it was out. We can use big-kid words like “sex” now that we are in college.
Finally, I would like to address using hooking-up as a relationship term. This is the biggest misnomer of all. This sort of labeling makes little sense, whether you are using it to describe a current or a past fling. Hooking-up does not explain the depths of your sexual involvement, nor is it in any way a definition of your commitment.
Telling someone you are hooking-up basically says that it’st exclusive, unless otherwise disclosed. In this context, hooking-up really is an incredibly awkward phase. It may be a short phase of general togetherness that happens prior to some official and public commitment. It could also be an extensive period of time where there is no label or commitment. The longer the hooking-up phase, the more strenuous the relationship becomes. Curiosity lingers, limitations are self-inflicted and frustration ultimately strikes before there is some weird quasi-break-up from your unofficial relationship.
Maybe these definitions are bordering on bitter, but I’m sure everyone has or knows someone who has been a victim of a hooking-up miscommunication. It is critical that when talking about hooking-up a clear definition is chosen for the context of the story. It is also important that in a hooking-up relationship both participants are aware of the expectations of the other. So let’s all try to use hooking-up responsibly.
Denise Nilan is a journalism senior and the Mustang Daily’s new sex columnist.