From Laura Stepp's new book on the pernicious hook up culture:
"Relationships have been replaced by the casual sexual encounters known as hookups. Love, while desired by some, is being put on hold or seen as impossible. Some girls can handle this; others … are exhausted physically, emotionally and spiritually by it."
Doesn't that also describe...relationships? It's certainly been true in my experience that some of my friends easily enter into healthy, fulfilling relationships while others vibrate through turbulent, obsessive, draining unions. And that's not a new effect born out of hook up culture. Go pick up some older literature, what with all the protagonists piercing their breasts over romantic agony and walking into the sea to escape another day of lovelessness. None of my college friends, at least, were reacting to their soulless hedonism like that.
