The term ‘hookup culture’ may bring different emotions to your mind. Whether it be disgust, anger, or mere sadness, the term typically doesn’t tend to be a positive one. Indeed, the issue of hookups has more effects on those who partake than just physical diseases, including an increase in loneliness and mental health struggles.
As more and more of our generation try to satisfy themselves through physical connection, the emptiness they feel inside grows every time. Jonnell Patton, Upper School Guidance Counselor, remarks how “people are looking for something and it’s not working. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that loneliness increases as hookup culture and the view of modern dating changes.” As our generation searches for real human relationships, they find themselves unable to forge satisfying connections, and instead turn to desire and attraction.
But even that doesn’t fulfill them. Shola Adedeji, writer from The Minded, describes how “while hookups may temporarily satisfy our physical needs thanks to oxytocin, they rarely fulfill our deeper emotional ones.” Oxytocin is a natural hormone that humans produce, often referred to as the “love hormone,” released during most hookups, giving a temporary high. However, once the moment is over, oxytocin fades, leaving people unsatisfied and in the same lonely situation they were in before the hookup.
Additionally, as hookup culture rises, mental health in young adults declines. In an article from the National Library of Medicine, it is written that hookups are “associated with psychological distress, including anxiety and depression, as well as low self-esteem and reduced life satisfaction,” according to the research of Bersamin et al., 2014. Many people who partake in hookups find themselves feeling unsatisfied, not only with a lack of relational intimacy, but with their lives in general. Searching and failing for one thing to fulfill them, their day-to-day life becomes bleak and boring, and their mental health rapidly declines.
The damage hookups cause creates a breach in human relationships when it is assumed that temporary physical desires will satisfy the deeper relational needs that every person possesses. As opposed to merely searching for satisfaction in temporary hookups, people should instead focus on developing healthy relationships in depth.
