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Girl Meets Boy

Editorial From The Wall Street Journal -- August 3, 2001

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Girl Meets Boy

Birds do it. Bees do it. And so does that highly secretive species known as the American college student.

But just what exactly do they do and how do they do it? It's one of the perplexities of our culture's obsession with "tolerance" that we know more about the courtship and mating rituals of virtually every form of wildlife other than young men and women on campus. As a new study suggests, we ought to be paying more attention. Society has a stake in how its young people relate to one another.

"Hooking Up, Hanging Out and Looking for Mr. Right" is a survey of college women on their attitudes toward sexuality, dating, courtship and marriage conducted by the Institute for American Values for the Independent Women's Forum. The report is not for the faint-hearted. Parents with daughters in college should read ahead at their own risk.

First the good news. The survey finds that marriage is a major life goal for the overwhelming majority of college women. More surprising, given that the age of first marriage for women is now over 25, a majority would like to meet their future husbands in college. Also good news is that most think it's a bad idea to have a baby out of wedlock.

The bad news is that the overall context in which young women attend college today is thoroughly unsuitable for meeting these goals. Instead, the report found two extremes of "romantic" entanglement prevalent on campus. One extreme is "hooking up," aka "friends with benefits," and involves casual sex with no commitment. Although a minority of students engage in it -- the study found 40% of women had "hooked up" -- the practice has a huge impact on campus culture. Women don't like it, but they go along with it, believing they have little choice. The other extreme is "joined-at-the-hip" relationships, in which a young couple, usually without knowing each other very well, plunge into a sexual relationship and spend virtually all of their time together -- sleeping together, studying together, doing the laundry together.

Another finding is that "dating" -- in the traditional meaning of boy-asks-girl-out -- is virtually extinct. Instead, co-ed groups of young people "hang out" together in unstructured groups that leave women confused about what a young man's intentions might be. Even if a woman has sex with a guy, the women surveyed say they often don't know what to make of it. In such a case, the new etiquette leaves it to the woman to initiate something called "the talk" to find out if they are a couple. If the man says no, that's it. Sure, dating was hell, but this is progress? Whatever happened to female empowerment?

If all this sounds grim, consider the culture in which these confused young women exist. The message they hear from colleges and parents is to delay marriage and focus on their careers. In and of itself, that's not necessarily bad advice for a young woman, especially in an era when divorce can leave an unskilled wife in a precarious economic position. But at the same time, universities and parents are offering no guidance on how young women ought to comport themselves socially in the interim.

For possibly the first time in history, young women are left to make up the rules for themselves without older adult guidance. Parents, college administrators and health professionals have withdrawn from this role, the survey finds. While older adults are "willing to pass on information in the interest of protecting young people's physical health, [they] are largely and curiously silent when it comes to the deeper questions of love, commitment, and marriage."

So what is to be done? Here the report isn't of much help, except to say that young men need to take more initiative in dating and that parents and universities ought to support the creation of "updated social norms, rituals and relationship milestones." That's a lot more easily said than done, especially in an academic setting, where administrators have had three decades of experience in opening coed dorms and then closing their eyes to what goes on in them. In any event, this report is a good first step to explaining how the birds and the bees operate on campus these days and to understanding how parents and universities are failing young women.

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