DOCTOR HOOKUP

I received a seemingly innocuous e-mail a couple of years ago, its subject bearing a rather enticing exclamation: "SOMEBODY HAS A CRUSH ON YOU!" My initial thought was that it was some sort of bait that would reveal, once opened, how I could increase the intensity of my sex life by taking an herbal supplement. But the message was not sent from some generic address; it was from crushlink.com. I opened the message to find that, indeed, somebody had a crush on me. The e-mail included a link to a website advertising that you can anonymously submit the e-mail addresses of the people you like--all 20 of them. The cyber-cupid, in turn, will send your crushes an e-mail, much like the one I received, and your crush sends the site the e-mail addresses of his crushes. If they match, then--gee whiz!--you have yourself a love connection.

At this point, I was somewhat flattered. But before this message could boost my ego enough for me to perceive it as a love letter, the delete button on my keyboard started to draw more and more of my attention. Is this what courting has come to: anonymously sending e-mails through a non-existent third person to find out if the object of your affection reciprocates your feelings? I felt like I was back in the second grade.

"Do you like [insert name of creepy guy with B.O. who sits in front of me in psych lecture here]? Circle one: Yes No Maybe."

That "maybe" option always seemed a little strange to me. How can there be a "maybe" when it comes to something that everyone always thought was so definitively black and white? The courtship that once brought together men and women has now thrown men and women, men and men and women and women together into a pile of maybes--a void that has cut off the rules of conventional dating and instead prompted a random free-for-all. Had a simple, elementary school situation been washed away by kegs and kegs of beer? Or had something else really happened? Are we wasting our romantic potential on a nobody instead of a somebody?

Another way our loneliness manifests itself in us is in our penchant for drinking to the point of "blackout." Many of us can remember--or not remember--a night when the drinking went too far, leaving us in an unfamiliar room, with an unfamiliar person, half-clothed and half-sober. "It is simply hard to start dating a girl whom you wake up beside when you don't know her name, don't remember where she came from or what you did with her," says George, who, in just one year, has had considerable experience with women at Duke and thus requested to salvage his dignity by withholding his name. "I attribute that to the blackout party style of Duke. Social life here is lacking so we compensate by drinking more than we should."

George credits his party lifestyle and tendency to black out from alcohol with many of the "randoms," as he calls them, that he has been with. At Duke, we are proud of our "work hard, party hard" attitude and mentality, but many of us know we tend to lose our inhibitions as soon as the first beer goes down. So, partying and hooking up tend to go hand-in-hand.

What about "friends with benefits" or "booty calls" or, God forbid, a "committed relationship?" George, for one, sees all of these things as "forms of dating." So, now we have differing forms of dating, and any emotional attachment to a person with whom you have any sexual connection virtually weds that person to you. Even a no-strings-attached view of a relationship seems too good to be true, and often it is. Emotions inevitably enter the picture and friends with benefits or booty calls either turn into girlfriends/boyfriends or not friends. But our trendy and modern personality has moved past acknowledging formal courtship as something worth our time. Without question, the dating game today is quite different from what it was generations ago.

Believe it or not, once upon a time--as recently as the 1960s--couples shared a romantic dinner at which they could define their relationship, with the offer to "go steady" or the Duke fraternity boy securing his pin to the sorority girl. It was all less of a game than today's scene--and more of a storybook cliché--that actually transpired. Their union was heavily influenced by parents, and dating became a way for boy and girl to explore each other's feelings before their fates were sealed with marriage vows. Even at college, the ideal of co-dependence instilled by their parents overshadowed any idea of independence--and that decline began more than a century ago.

"I think arranged marriages got less important as landowning became important to fewer families," Quinn says. "With industrialization, immigration, westward expansion... the automobile--which gave so much freedom to teens--[and] the introduction of new methods of contraception, by the last half of the 20th century, dating had become completely extricated from parental oversight."

This picture of relationships seems familiar, but--admit it--it's foreign to most of us. Even seniors Jim Perry and Katy Lowry, who have been dating for more than three-and-a-half years now, don't need to cuddle 24/7, as "aw shucks" as they may be. "We allow each other space to grow and change and figure out what we want to do with the rest of our lives, knowing that if our relationship cannot survive that change then it won't make it in the long run anyway," Perry says.

Isn't that precious? Why don't we fast-forward to now?

As much as we want to believe that great relationships happen every time, the reality these days is that we are back to where we started: single, lonely and in need of ass. So we take matters into our own hands.

"At Duke, girls are the aggressors in terms of hooking up," George says matter-of-factly. "[On a typical night,] I get really wasted and some horny, sober girl snipes me and takes me home because I am blackout drunk. Guys don't have to make as much of an effort to get a girl here. Everyone is so wasted--because that constitutes a good time at Duke--so, everyone gets really horny and has sex with each other."

Cloudy school social climate aside, the Sex and the City-inspired freedom from relationships, commitment and holding friggin' hands has cultivated the novel idea that it's okay to be single; it's okay to be independent. And if women here really are the ones leading the way to the new heyday of hooking up, then maybe the sexual revolution has come full circle.

"If young women at Duke are going to participate in this, they have to own the experience," says Weeks, a self-proclaimed feminist. "In other words, [they should] pine over telephone calls, prepare and worry about the aftermath as much as their partner would. Be as loosely connected to the experience as the name 'hook-up' suggests."

However, there are some who argue that this wave of sexual freedom is not about female empowerment, that it does not even promote self-worth. In a New York Times Magazine story last May, radio sex guru Dr. Drew Pinsky said, "It's all bravado. Teens are unwittingly swept up in the social mores of the moment, and it's certainly not some alternative they're choosing to keep from getting hurt emotionally. The fact is, girls don't enjoy hookups nearly as much as boys, no matter what they say at the time. They're only doing it because that's what the boys want."

But because of the influence of all the feminine strength and sexual independence that have grown since the generation before ours, sexual freedom throughout all of our forms of dating equals strength, and wanting anything less is showing weakness.

"Today, it seems to me, there is a mixed cultural picture," Quinn says. "Some women are fiercely independent and want to be free to pursue their own careers, while others are still concerned to marry after college, have children, and if not staying home and being entirely supported by their husbands, at least choosing a profession that is compatible with their husband's profession--including mobile, so she can move as his job demands--and with child care. There are still many women out there like that, even at Duke. But maybe they keep quiet about their aspirations, because the tide has shifted to make it a little shameful not to want to support yourself."

Perhaps the women's movement is not suited for every woman. Nonetheless, its effects and those of other social movements on our generation are undeniable. As we all become more liberated from our parents' oversight, the traditional ideas of sexuality, love and co-dependence do not cling to our hearts like they did for previous generations. "I don't think that the hookup culture is really an answer to people's problems," Perry says, "but something that people do because they find it to be fun."

In an age when convenience and efficiency are fundamental and necessary in life, we tend to be impulsive and act based on how we feel, whether horny or even romantic. However, when our most vulnerable sides depend on someone else, impulse does not come into effect; we guard our feelings because those may be the last remnants of humanity we know for sure. Emotionless relationships remain empty and unsatisfying, which is exactly why we continue to participate in them. We hope that one day it'll change, but we know it won't. Filling a void for as long as possible before we find our permanent or semi-permanent partner: this is what we are all doing.

But imagine what would happen if that day never comes?

I decided not to send crushlink.com the e-mail addresses of the boys I like--partly because I thought the whole idea was preposterous, but also, partly because I was scared. Scared that I wouldn't get a match, scared that I would. Personally, I find the void quite pleasant, simply because I never know when it could be filled.