July 01, 2005
Hookups
There was an article, "Casual Relationships, Yes. Casual Sex, Not Really," which, while you now need to pay to read, you can get for free in the Taipai Times' article "To 'Sex and the City' and beyond."
The article attempts to define the word "hookup" as "anything from making out to doing the nasty, generally with no commitment or plans for said commitment." Another person claims that it matters less what actually happens than that "the meeting is unplanned and even unexpected."
The word clearly has different meanings in different circumstances. Hookup can mean:
1. To meet up at a certain point in time ("Let's hookup later and see a movie")
2. To kiss, but not to do anything else
3. To be more intimate than kissing but specifically to not have sex
4. To have sex
Usage varies by age, context, culture, and geography. Sometimes the word is used because a person is trying to articulate exactly what happened and to differentiate what happened from other possible meanings of hookup. For example, someone might use hookup in the sentence, "we hooked up last night" with the intent to articulate that #2 happened but not #3 or #4. Someone else in a different context could easily use the word to mean that #3 happened but not #2 or #4. Other times it is used to be intentionally ambiguous about what happened, as a way of not giving out too much information.
However, regardless of which of the above meanings is used, it would seem that it can apply equally to an encounter that is planned in advance as one that is impromptu, and can apply as much to an encounter involving commitment as one that does not.
Posted by Lonne at 02:51 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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Comments
Before an SO becomes S, liberated kids these days can conduct a physical inspection. It's the fact of the inspection, and what it says about the stage of the relationship, that "hooking up" gets at, not the content of the inspection. It's the fact of healthy limits, and the eventual "need" to settle down, that offers abundant opportunities for punditry.
Posted by: Matt Jacobson at July 2, 2005 01:03 PM
If there didn't exist a term ambiguous enough to allow women to minimize the significance what may or may not have happened, while at the same time allowing men to maximize the same, it would have had to have been invented!
Posted by: Ben at July 11, 2005 01:49 PM
Great point, Ben!
Posted by: Lonne at July 11, 2005 02:30 PM
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