Growing up, millennials were fed various fantasies about what romantic relationships are supposed to look like. As an example, someone showing an interest in you was supposed to indicate their interest in a long-term, committed relationship.
To state the obvious, so many ultimately have vastly different experiences. Partly because of the hook-up culture and dating apps that have proliferated, but also because men and women alike can take advantage of each other. As we all already know, for instance, “gold-diggers” are stereotyped enough to indicate a substantial group, and women conversely more often experience the raw end of male sexual expectation. As the journal Human Nature shows, most women in a study on hook-ups reported on their sexual experiences by expressing their “regret at being used” and sense of self-degradation (as opposed to 80% of men, who expressed feeling “euphoric” and “excitement and lust,” because their partner was considered desirable to others and their experiences were more sexually satisfying).
Since Her Campus Duke is a website geared for women, I would like to focus exclusively on how guys might try to use them. While women often feel lied to and manipulated in men’s exclusively sexual pursuits, men can also use women for social proof. For instance, him entering into a relationship can suggest to others that he is a trustworthy guy—after all, why would she still be sticking around? A naïve person necessarily can’t see someone else’s lack of the same. Personal validation is also something that someone might gain from dating another person. If she for instance has a higher social status or more wealth, he might crave her constant approval. Lastly, a guy might date someone just so he can get introduced to more women. His thinking might be that they will see that he is dating someone who’s attractive, and that will automatically make him more desirable in their eyes.
On another note, one might begin to look at the underpinnings of girls’ mindsets for the sake of context. As an example, a researcher in the Human Nature study offered a potential explanation for why women might keep hooking up even if doing it once feels awful; they would like to collect healthy genes for their offspring. A woman might not be able to score a relationship with a guy who could offer a particular kind of intelligence, but she might be thinking “Why not grab him for sex?” That kind of positing poses another issue concerning the way both men and women think about relationships. As per the dictates of our biology, all we have to do with our lives is survive and reproduce. If romantic relationships don’t necessarily have biological bases, they make me wonder how a person begins to see or create meaning in their outgrowth.