A Casual Affair

The Hookup Handbook
by Jessica Rozler, Andrea Lavinthal

Dating is a thing of the past, gone the way of dinosaurs and stirrup pants. It's extinct. Kaput. Over. It's given way to two mighty opponents: In one corner, wearing matching sweats and cuddling up to DVDs every Friday night, we have the Serious Couple. In the other corner, armed with open bar tabs and clad in his-and-hers Seven jeans, the Hookup. By the looks of things, for the millions of people who bravely head out each night in search of this wily conquest, the Hookup is the new heavyweight champion &mdash and hooking up is here to stay.

In The Hookup Handbook, Andrea Lavinthal and Jessica Rozler have braved the hookup trenches to bring you the essential guide to the new, nondating game &mdash from the players and locations to the long walk of shame home.

It's not sex and the city — it's sex and your city, your bedroom, your dorm room, or anywhere else two people get it on. Or maybe it isn't sex at all. Maybe it's kissing, making out, or getting to third base. One thing's for sure: It's not a one-night stand, it's not dating, and it's not jamming your foot into a teeny glass slipper in the hopes that you'll one day marry a Prince Charming who can support you in the princess lifestyle to which you hope to become accustomed.

It's "hooking up," the vague phrase used to describe what happens between two people who don't necessarily have any foreseeable future or even a hint of commitment. Hooking up is a bunch of things (or it isn't, depending on whom you ask). What we do know is that it has become the most accepted term for our generation's extracurricular activities. We remember first hearing it when we were in high school, but since then it's cast its commitment-phobic net onto college and beyond.

Yes, the rules have changed. Way back in the day, when Brazilian bikini waxes were reserved for strippers and Brazilians, and mobile phones could easily double as free weights, the term "hooking up" didn't even exist. Instead, a girl often found herself asking: "When do you think he'll call?"; "It's been three dates, should I sleep with him?"; or "Should I take him home to meet my parents?" Today we're more likely to hear: "When do you think he'll call — before or after last call?"; "We've hooked up three times, shouldn't he ask me out?"; or "Is it still considered the walk of shame if I take a taxi home?"

If you're unfamiliar with the term "hooking up," maybe this typical scenario will help:

• Girl A sort of knows Boy B (maybe they were in the same Psych 101 class, have mutual friends, or perhaps they've even slept together before).

• Girl A goes out to the bar with her friends, and Boy B goes out to the bar with his friends.

• Girl A stands in one corner of the bar, downs cosmopolitans, screams the words to "Like a Prayer" at the top of her lungs, and pretends to ignore Boy B.

• Boy B stands in another corner of the bar and chugs beers with his friends.

• When Girl A finally gets enough courage (i.e., is drunk enough), she approaches Boy B and says, "Hey, what's going on?"

• When Boy B finally realizes that Girl A is the best he's going to do tonight, he answers, "Nothin'."

• The two proceed to make out at the bar and then go back to his place and "hook up."

Confused about whether Girl A and Boy B slept together, merely cuddled on the couch, or did some major rewiring of Boy B's home entertainment system? You are not alone. Ambiguity is key to hooking up. We've heard it defined as everything from making out to full-on sex, but for most people it's somewhere in between a peck on the lips and some grinding with your hips.

Or, as one of our male friends articulately put it, "It's not hooking up unless I blow my load."

And, while according to Amazon.com (as of the writing of this book), there are 22,395 books about sex, 1,985 books about dating, and 25,652 books about tricking some poor schmuck into marrying you, the only book we could find about hooking up taught us how to effectively design steam systems.

It seems we are part of the dawn of a new era. Dating as we know it has gone the way of dinosaurs, eight-track players, and stirrup pants. Extinct. Vanished. Kaput. Left in its place stand two mighty opponents. In one corner, wearing matching sweats and snuggled together watching Friday-night prime-time TV, we have the "Serious Couple." In the other corner, clad in his-and-hers Seven jeans and armed with open bar tabs, we have the "Hookup." By the looks of things, hooking up is the new heavyweight champion.

So even though hooking up is a national phenomenon whose popularity rivals the height of slap-bracelet fervor, the "it" phrase of single people everywhere has been left unexamined. That's where we come in: We're young, we've lived through the dawn of the hookup, and we've witnessed its reign everywhere from the sex-crazed campus of Syracuse University to the bars and clubs of New York City. We've endured endless dinners with our girlfriends where we dissected, analyzed, and discussed their (and our) current hookups. We've sat through countless morning-after brunches listening to the details of the previous night's hookups while trying not to lose our appetite. And we've heard "So, last night we hooked up..." so many times that we're now left wondering if that meant they had sex, swapped spit, or just watched the Food Network for a few hours while holding hands.

After months of investigation and years of observation, we've uncovered that while, like snowflakes, no two hookups are identical, there are enough recurring stories to identify fourteen types of these encounters with the opposite sex. But before we get to the good stuff, we had to ask how hooking up became the phenomenon that it is today. No one knows where the term came from, but our best guess is that it evolved from the more casual meaning of "getting together as friends." Here's a helpful time line (it's short, for all you readers with attention deficit issues) of the historical milestones that probably helped squeeze the life out of traditional dating.

A Short Time Line of Recent
Events That Paved the Way
to a Hookup Nation

1956: Elvis swivels his hips on national television and makes the squares all hot and bothered. Teenagers know better: Maybe it's time to toss away the Donna Reed pearls and get a little wild.

1960: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves the birth control pill — finally, an alternative to the tried-and-true rhythm method.

1969: Woodstock brings thousands of hippies to upstate New York for peace, tree-smoking, and, of course, free love. Some things never change (except maybe the peace thing).

1971: Oberlin College in Ohio, the nation's first coeducational college, also becomes one of the first schools to permit coed dorms, allowing for easier access to booty.

1977: Studio 54 opens its doors, quickly becoming a haven for public grinding among the rich and fabulous (which was nothing compared to your office holiday party, but still, it was scandalous).

1981: MTV first hits the airwaves. Not a big deal at first, but it eventually gives the nation glimpses of a gyrating Madonna, kinky Prince, and, um, very naughty George Michael (and let's not forget The Real World), turning the temperature way up on American pop culture.

1983: Motorola markets the first portable cellular phone for consumers (weighing in at twenty-eight ounces). This little breakthrough opened up the possibility for the first mobile booty calls.

1985: AOL launches, paving the way for cyber-hookups and the ever-popular human-contact eliminator, the instant messenger. By 1994 over one million people were members, and by 2002 everyone was somehow involved in an Internet sex scandal.

1990: Salt-N-Pepa releases the pivotal album Blacks' Magic, which contains the safe-sex anthem "Let's Talk About Sex."

1993: The Reality Female Condom gets the go-ahead from the FDA and before long manages to gross out an entire nation.

1998: President Bill Clinton gets caught in a very compromising position with his intern. When he's forced to go public with his extracurricular activities, we get a taste of the first-ever instance of selective storytelling at the White House.

2001: Smirnoff Ice first shows up in bars across the country (not the first premium malt beverage, but much less pathetic than Zima). Finally, even the wusses could get drunk and lower their standards.

2003 AND BEYOND: Recent popular song titles: "Dirrty" and "Magic Stick." Enough said.

In addition to the chronology of it all, we also identified the more general "Big Four" societal symptoms — we like to think of them as enablers — that help explain this growing trend of choosing McBooty over happily ever after. Here is the incriminating evidence (drumroll, please):

Text copyright © 2005 by Andrea Lavinthal and Jessica Rozler
Illustrations copyright © 2005 by Cindy Luu

About the Author

Jessica Rozler has joined forces with Johns Hopkins University to develop a Breathalyzer-activated cell phone that will eradicate drunk dialing as we know it. She works in book publishing and lives in New York City. This is her first book.

Often referred to as "boy crazy," Andrea Lavinthal likes to point out that while she enjoys having several suitors at one time, she's not opposed to finding her Prince Charming and settling down in New Jersey. She is a beauty editor in New York City, and this is her first book.