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Identity, intimacy and "hooking up"

On campuses across the country students find themselves confronted with-or invited into-the culture of “hooking up.” The term “hooking up” covers a spectrum of activities. It can refer to a casual or spontaneous spending time together, replacing other generations’ practices of “dating.” On the other hand, it more often refers to practices of casual sexual partnering with no particular implication of commitment or intention of building a relationship. This set of reflections focuses more on the latter sense of the term.

If national magazines and some significant research* are to be trusted, hooking-up often begins with youth early in their teen years. With a classmate, casual friend, or someone met for the first time at a party, one engages another in having sex. With or without mutual attraction, the coupling occurs. A more sustained relationship may develop, or they go their separate ways. This mode of easy “hooking up” invites, liberates, or pressures, participants to regard sex as a medium for meeting, almost as casual as a handshake or a cheek-kiss. It implies no particular responsibility to or for each other.

The prevalence of this pattern creates subtle—and not so subtle—pressures to comply. Symptoms of hurt, shame, and self-loathing are suppressed. The consequences of hooking up can bring depression, health and physical problems, and a sense of isolation and distraction from study and social life. The influence of the hook-up culture invites self-deception and the denial of negative emotions. The pattern of denial often leads to medical and mental health issues that have significant consequences.

The pattern of casual or coerced hooking-up reflects a culture of emotional detachment. It usually involves an impersonal physical encounter that trivializes the spirituality and mutual trust that mark committed sexual coupling-and intimacy. It is striking how frequently the prelude to hooking-up involves the combination of alcohol or drugs and peer pressure.

In his classic work Childhood and Society, Erik Erikson offers an eight-stage sequence of developmental passages that constitute the human life cycle. He names the entry into the adolescent years as the passage into dealing with “Identity versus Role Confusion.” This refers to the developmental task for forming a sense of self, with inner coherence and outer boundaries. Erikson knew that important cognitive and emotional developments parallel the move into the physical and emotional and maturing of adolescence.

He saw adolescence as a time of engaging in psychosexual maturation through coming to know friends of both sexes in ways that shared the mysteries and joys of intellectual, emotional and spiritual growth-and self-discovery.
In the course of identity formation the experience and knowledge of self that comes from deep friendships or love relationships strongly contribute to our forming a sense of identity and of self-worth.

In this way we take on the challenges of coming to know others in depth. These relations of love and friendship, Erikson believed, prepare us for the young adult challenges that he calls “Intimacy versus Isolation.” He sees movement into this stage emerging in ages eighteen to twenty-two, the era of the traditional college years.

Intimacy, for Erikson, means having a clear enough grasp of one’s own identity and personhood to be able to bring a firming sense of self into trusting and non-exploitative relationships with others. Identity means developing values and purpose, self-knowledge, self love, judgment and choice. ‘To claim genuine intimacy involves bringing the maturing selfhood of each partner into emotional, intellectual and moral closeness with each other. Intimacy means developing the capacity to engage in closeness with others, including sexual closeness, without needing to use or manipulate the other, and without allowing or fearing the loss or abuse of oneself. Intimacy inherently involves boundaries and mutual commitment.

The risky drama of hooking-up reflects a culture that is losing its capacity to help youth and young adults form a sense of identity and to grow toward a capacity for intimacy. It obscures the knowledge that genuine intimacy involves much, much more than acts of fleeting and risky sexual sharing. ‘The choice to reject hooking-up means claiming or reclaiming the significance of sex as an intimate sharing of oneself, and receiving of another, where care for oneself, and for the other, frame the relation.

* See “Hooking Up, Hanging Out and Hoping for Mr. Right: College Women on Mating and Dating Today” An Institute for American Values Report to the Independent Women’s Forum. For this well-conducted research study go to americanvalues.org/html/r-hooking_up.html. The term “hooking-up” covers a spectrum of ways of relating, and may be useful for those who use the term precisely because of its flexible range of meanings.

[ Posted by James Fowler at August 23, 2004 11:03 AM | More Opinion articles ]

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