By Andy Matarrese
It's 5 p.m. You've spent the better part of the last hour getting ready, selecting your ensemble and parting your hair just right. Cap that onto nearly a week of planning and organizing, add the scrimping and saving and phone calls home to retrieve some cash, and you're finally set to head out to pick up your date.
Who lives in your dorm, just down the hall, maybe 30 feet away. Tops. Who would probably be content just to go to tonight's CPB movie.
Sound silly?
You're not alone. It seems that on college campuses, traditional, formalized dating is on the downswing.
"It doesn't seem silly to go out on a date," senior Stacy Holtmann said.
"But it seems silly to make it formal."
Indeed, according to a survey by the Institute for American Values that queried 1,000 female college seniors, only a half of the women reported they were asked out on more than five dates while in college. A third were asked out on fewer than two occasions.
"You guys aren't looking for marriage partners now," UP sociology professor Robert Duff said of the new face of college dating. Duff explained that over time, college has become less a place for young people to pair off for marriage and more about preparing for their lives and careers.
Duff remembers when going to college and getting an education used to be a search for a partner, a search that took the form of dating until you found someone.
There were books and films about proper dating etiquette, which flowers to buy, holding doors and the like, he said.
Duff recalled taking a woman out on a date one night during his college years and wondering why she refused to get in his car.
"I realized she wasn't getting in, so I had to run around and let her in," he said, explaining that he broke a major dating rule by not opening the door for her.
That's not likely to be an issue any more, said Duff, whose explanation for not knowing the rules that night so long ago was that he went to an all-male school.
"The whole ritual and selection process isn't very relevant," Duff said.
It also might be that students these days have other things to worry about besides finding Mr. or Ms. Right.
"Ultimately you really are in college to get an education," senior Anna Gullickson said. Gullickson said young women aren't necessarily coming to college with the expectation of finding a partner with whom to settle down. College is part of a larger life plan, which could include travel, moving to a new place and starting a career, she said.
"We don't have to find a man to be successful," she added.
Statistics for median ages at firt marriage seem to agree. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median age in 1980 for females to marry was 22.0 and 24.7 for males. By 2006 those ages rose to 25.9 for females and 27.5 for males.
So what do young people do if they don't date?
Engage in a life of debauchery and moral degradation by means of the so-called hook up?
Well, yes and no, according to sociology and criminal justice professor Kathleen A. Bogle of La Salle University. Bogle's book, "Hooking up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus," was released last year and is still causing a stir among pundits.
"Hooking up is not new," and has been an entrenched part of college culture for decades, Bogle wrote in a recent commentary for the Chronicle of Higher Education. The shift from dating to hooking up began because of societal changes in the 1960s, ranging from general attitudes of rebellion to rising enrollments and the establishment of coeducational colleges and dorms.
"Hooking up began and has flourished because students now have unfettered access to each other, and because casual relationships have become socially acceptable," she wrote in The Chronicle.
According to Duff, civil society probably won't break down because young people aren't going steady like they used to.
"There shouldn't be any lamenting over this," he said. "It wasn't any great thing."
Duff said the dating system isn't perfect and never was. Some argued that dating was superficial and allowed people to put forth false fronts.
Sophomore Logan Sharpe said some of the outcry against hooking up might just be resistance to change and a reaction in favor of an idealized past.
"This isn't your parent's college," he said.
Sharpe said he doesn't see himself going on the traditional weekend date, but perhaps going to house parties or the occasional trip downtown.
Sharpe said that although it might not fit into the traditional date concept in American culture, it's important to notice the fundamental similarity between the past and the present: Even if they're in a different setting, couples are still spending time together.
"The point of a date is to get to know someone," said Holtmann, who characterizes formalized dating as silly.
While the occasional formal date can be fun, she said it fills the same function as watching a DVD in a dorm room.
She said informality marked how she met her old boyfriend.
"We started hanging out a lot," she explained. After a while, they were dating.
Sophomore Melissa Rindge said that she and her boyfriend connected after the freshmen orientation mixer, and had a similar experience.
They occasionally go out on traditional dates, but there are forces beyond social trends and campus culture that prevent them from fancy dinner-and-a-movie dates every weekend.
"We're poor college kids," she said.
In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Bogle said young people today aren't likely to be as sexually involved as people may think.
First off, students tend to overestimate what their peers are doing, she said.
"Students often perceive that others hook up more often and go farther sexually during their hook -up encounters," she added.
The numbers show that young people aren't engaging in sexual behavior like they had in the past.
She noted that among male students, the number of sexual partners in the previous year had dropped from 2.1 in 2000 to 1.6 in 2006. Another study, in 2001, showed that 39 percent of freshmen college women were virgins and 31 percent of those women still hadn't had sex by the time they graduated. In 2006, nearly half of Harvard undergrads surveyed reported they had never had intercourse.
Regardless, the real danger of the hook-up culture doesn't stem from the demise of courtship, according to UP Health Center psychologist Kelly Petrino.
The real danger is far more tangible.
Besides the risks of contracting an STD or the woman becoming pregnant, that alcohol is often involved in these casual encounters increases risk for sexual assault or emotional damage.
"There can be some regret, maybe some self-hatred for engaging in activities you wouldn't do otherwise," she added.
Still, all is not lost for the hopeless romantic.
Bogle, the sociologist, said that in later years, the paradigm tends to shift back to traditional dating.
Holtmann, the UP senior, agrees. "The older I've gotten the more I've 'dated' dated."
