Dalliance and dopamine: another look at hookups

There was a time when it seemed that every time you’d open The Daily Princetonian there would be an opinion piece about “hookup culture.” Gallons of ink were spilled over the issue, with anonymous contributors sharing sexual anecdotes while columnists agonized over the culture’s effect on gender roles and romantic orientation, with a fair amount of moralizing thrown in for good measure. The interminable debates inspired parody by the Tiger Magazine and, of course, commentary by the Princeton Tory. It seems that the campus breathed a sigh of relief as the argument gradually wore itself out and the view that “if you don’t want to hook up, don’t hook up,” as summarized by Colby Pines, reasserted itself as the default sentiment.

Since the beginning of this academic year, I haven’t been aware of any resurgence of this debate — for which I’m sure most are grateful. That being said, hookups are an undeniably prominent part of the Princeton culture and experience, and one that most incoming students aren’t familiar with as high schools tend to be more relationship-oriented. It’s therefore worth it to take a critical look at this aspect of our culture, rather than just accepting the status quo.

The first thing that jumps out about the practice of serial hookups is that it is rarely, if ever, designed to be a long-term plan. I don’t know if statistics for Princeton students exist, but the U.S. Census indicates that by the age of 30, over 80 percent of Americans have been married at least once and over 60 percent remain so. While marriage rates are on the decline for our generation, it still seems true that the endgame for most people involves, eventually, a spouse and children. In this regard, serial hookups don’t fit with most students’ future plans; at some point, those who want monogamy will presumably eventually want to replace the uncommitted, casual sexuality of hookups with the commitment and emotional attachment of a serious relationship.

This disconnect between serial hookups and most people’s future plans is not too concerning on its own. We do lots of things here that we don’t plan on doing after — living in dormitories, taking classes, singing in a capella groups, doing sports, drinking like sailors — so why should our sexual relationships be any different? The difference, in fact, is something peculiar to sex: its uniquely powerful reward mechanism.

A discussion of the effect of sex on the brain could very quickly devolve into an excursus on neurochemistry and evolutionary psychology. Leaving the technicalities aside, it suffices to say that humans have a strong reward system for sex: having an orgasm causes the release of neurotransmitters that ingrain the behaviors that led up to it. This makes sense in an evolutionary perspective as sex is linked to reproductive success — those primates that were able to learn what behaviors were associated with successfully having sex were more likely to pass on their genes. The danger is that one cannot choose exactly which associations the brain will strengthen, as seen in a series of studies since the 1960s which successfully conditioned subjects to respond with sexual arousal to stimuli as varied as boots or jars.

What does the power of sex as a training device mean for hookups? At the very least, it means that we should be cautious. If every sexual experience embeds an association between its circumstances and reproductive success, casual sex will only tend to make one want more casual sex. Worse can happen if hookups are being sought for a reason other than pure physical desire: hooking up to combat low self-esteem will associate low self-esteem with reproductive success; hooking up to be seen as cool will associate sex with social climbing. Neither of these examples are conducive to the formation of healthy, committed, long-term relationships.

Of course, we shouldn’t condemn hookups based on just this speculated effect. Data is always preferred. Few good studies have investigated the long-term effects of sexual promiscuity, but the data, though quite limited, points in favor of the above interpretation. By nature it is almost impossible to separate correlation and causation in a study like this, but the correlations are unambiguous: for instance, people who have more sexual partners report having unhappier marriages, and according to the Heritage Foundation, a woman’s number of previous sexual partners is positively correlated, in a linear manner, with the likelihood of acquiring an STD, getting divorced and becoming a single mother, as well as being negatively correlated with overall happiness. I strongly emphasize that I am not basing any of my conclusions upon these studies alone because of the huge confounds of socioeconomic status, age, underlying psychological disposition, religion and other factors. However, as Randall Munroe puts it, “correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively.”

A more clear-cut example of the training effect of sex can be seen with the phenomenon of Internet porn. As hardcore pornography became cheap, anonymously accessible and ubiquitous, one would predict that growing numbers of young men — the chief user base — would begin to train themselves to be out of touch with real sex. This would lead to increased rates of erectile dysfunction among otherwise-normal young men, which is exactly what has been reported in the past few years according to the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Unlike hookups, pornography usage has been causally linked, in a series of studies from the 1980s, to all kinds of scary negative consequences, including enhanced belief in “sexual servitude” of women, decreased belief in faithfulness and increased acceptance of sexual assault. This demonstrates that sexual release is as potent a training device as hypothesized above: the manner in which one habitually experiences sex can cause wide-ranging psychological effects, even to the point of making real, physical sex no longer sufficiently arousing.

So, what does all of this piecemeal evidence add up to? We have seen how casual sex could be a powerful mechanism with uncertain consequences and weak correlational evidence that backs this up. Further, we’ve noticed that in one domain, pornography, people’s ability to have real sex has been impaired by their own habits. In the same way that porn trains its users’ brains to seek out more voyeuristic, virtual sex, we can conclude that to some extent casual hookups train their participants to prefer unattached, uncommitted sex — a propensity that is incompatible with the long-term goal of family.

The takeaway is not that we need a return to Victorian sexual mores or that the University should institute social codes. Rather, we as free adults need to recognize the incompatibility between our behavior on Thursday and Saturday nights and our eventual goals in life, at least for those who will want marriage and children. The training mechanism of sex is very powerful, and we can’t assume that some latent desire for commitment and family will sweep aside years or decades of habit formation “when we’re ready.” It would be unrealistic and counterproductive to try to make everyone avoid premarital sex, hookups or even pornography; there certainly is some value in experimenting to learn what you want out of life. But it is imperative to understand the potency of sex as a training mechanism and the long-term effects that it can have.

Steve Swanson isa Computer Science major from Vienna, Va. He can bereached at sswanson@princeton.edu.