After freshman year, my girlfriends and I talked about our respective years in review. We are all located on various college campuses nationwide, so I heard a lot of different stories. I learned different bar names, the different types of girls they met during sorority rush and different fun things to do. All of our experiences were diverse; our experiences with new weather were different, our drunken stories were different, but one thing was the same: our romantic relationships (or lack thereof).
In today’s day and age, and in our lives as “millenials”, it seems as though no one dates anymore. In fact, you may be hooking up with a guy for six months just to learn you were wasting your time with someone who was never going to make things official. Gone are the days of going “steady,” or even of “FBO” (Facebook official) for that matter. Now, Instagramming a pic of you and your hookup is what makes your pseudo-relationship legit. And if you have gone on a dinner date, consider yourself practically married. After living in this screwed up hook up culture for almost four semesters now, I have broken down the college relationship gray area into three categories.
You two “hook up”: You and this guy met one night at a party or a bar, and you consistently hook up every time you are out, and nine out of 10 times it is under the influence. You rarely talk outside of the typical Thursday through Saturday night “what are you doing tonight?” texts, but you manage to end up with him every weekend. Proceed with caution, don’t be fooled and whatever you do, don’t get attached. You are not in a relationship, you are not even hooking up with this guy, you two hook up and there is a big difference between the two.
You two are “hooking up”: You hook up consistently on weekends, which is accompanied by a good amount of conversation during the week. There should not be awkwardness between you two, however awkwardness does lie within where you stand. It is often unclear if you are exclusive, but there are definitely notes of exclusivity within your relationship, which makes it all the more confusing. You are unsure, and will be unsure until something big happens like having a conversation about it, and then you are deemed…
“Together”: In this case, you two hook up with each other exclusively and talk on a regular basis. There is a solid foundation of a friendship here, and it is pretty much a given that he will be taking you to his fraternity’s formal. This is as un-gray as the gray area gets. However, he still might not take you out to that romantic dinner by The Capitol because as legitimate as you might think you are college relationships are still confusing and twisted.
One day, dates will come back into our culture, maybe, but until then the best us college girls can do is keep up with the screwed up Joneses.