An Emergency Exit from Hookup Culture
How can we offer better ways out of a bad equilibrium?
I enjoy getting the Sunday paper (in print!) and sneaking in as much of it as I can during the girls’ naptime. This weekend, the Modern Love essay stuck with me.
Grayson Zulauf was a typical frat guy, by his own description, until he sustained severe injuries to his back and leg while blacked out. (He still doesn’t know what happened, and if his fraternity brothers do, they’re not telling).
Breaking his back breaks the routines and expectations he had established at school:
And that’s how I started my last year of college, a year I had thought would be full of partying, girls and just enough school to get a job. Now I was facing a year of pain, crutches, recovery and self-pity. Twice a week, I went to physical therapy to relearn how to sit up straight. Every day, my mother called and said, “How are you doing? What happened that night? Stop lying to me.”
For the first time in college, I slowed down. I traded late nights out for long meals in the cafeteria with friends who were kind enough to carry my food tray. I treasured my classes and professors, signing up for faculty dinners and actually doing the reading.
And, in what I found particularly notable—losing his mobility gave him an unexpected kind of freedom. He asks a girl to dinner, shocking his best friend.
I left Danny at the library, in disbelief that I had nearly finished my final paper and that I had an actual date, my first ever. Never had I asked a girl out to dinner or coffee or on any sort of respectable outing. Everything had been casual hookups, fraternity and sorority mixers, drunken encounters.
Unsure how it would go, I prepared three questions on a notecard to ask at conversational lulls.
Emma ordered a goat cheese pizza. I had macaroni-and-cheese. We talked about her upcoming internship back home in Michigan and my injuries. At the first pause, I got nervous and went to my notecard: “How was your soccer season?”
None of this… should be that weird? It shouldn’t require a catastrophe for a young man to ask a girl to dinner (and ideally he wouldn’t need the cue cards, but if that’s what it took, more power to him).
As the rest of his essay reveals, his injury and his date became a eucatastrophe that shaped his entire adult life. But an exit fee of permanent, debilitating injury is waaaay too much to imagine college students will pay to get out of a toxic hookup culture.
For Zulauf, it didn’t occur to him to want more from himself or partners until he couldn’t stick to his old defaults. And being marked out by his injury made it easier for him to defect from the norms of his friends—he was already expected to do things differently due to his debility. It just turned out that in this case the “accommodation” was better than the “typical use” option.
Zulauf’s escape reminds me of a recent study that found that teens derive negative welfare from their use of social media apps. Researchers asked teens how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate TikTok or Instagram for a month while all their friends stayed active. The teens said they’d need to receive an average $59 to deactivate TikTok and $47 to deactivate Instagram, which could imply they find the services valuable.
Except the researchers also asked how much they’d need to pay or be paid to accept the whole service being down for a month—so they couldn’t use it, but neither could their friends. And then, the teens were eager to pay to get loose of the apps (averaging $28/mo for no TikTok and $10/mo for no Instagram). As the researchers summed up:
Sixty-four percent of active TikTok users and 48% of active Instagram users experience negative welfare from the products’ existence; they find it individually optimal to use the product even if they would prefer it not exist.
It takes coordinated action for you and your friends to all get unstuck at once. (And you can’t rely on there being a national security argument to shut down every pernicious app).
In our neighborhood, a number of families have taken The Postman Pledge to take a step back from the algorithmic and recommit to the real world. It’s easier to say “no” for the sake of a shared “yes” than to just disengage with no real alternative.
Professor Timothy O’Malley has had to cap his class (THEO 20425 – The Nuptial Mystery: Divine Love and Human Salvation) at 150 students, ever since he asked students to go on a real, official date as an optional part of the curriculum. Students valued a way to live differently, which wasn’t exactly their fault.
It’s a lot more pleasant than having to be put in traction in order to choose differently.
I am still pondering your questions, however I wanted to pull out this sentence and address this:
*It’s easier to say “no” for the sake of a shared “yes” than to just disengage with no real alternative.*
I wanted to address this because my older children have chosen to disengage, and unfortunately they have no real shared "yes" in that choice. And it is, has been, so hard. My oldest is nearly 23 and he frequently feels both so alone and so disconnected, but he doesn't want to touch the various social media that his "arm's length friends" engage with. He has seen first hand how they do not and cannot connect with each other, even when they are in person because they are glued to their scrolling on social media.
My next two oldest are similar, as well. They would much rather engage with their peers face-to-face, small group. They are not on social media, really at all. And they have trouble connecting with their peers, mainly because their peers only really seem to connect, to be able to connect, over the latest social media trend.
It's lonely for them, I know, and I worry how they will be able to find their own sense of community (let alone spouses - if that's where they're called), when their own peers seemingly aren't able to disengage and join them.
> Where have you benefited from being unable to go along with a bad-for-you culture?
In the spring of 2020, I was struggling to nurse my first baby. My state’s Covid policies freed me from the “obligation” to leave the house for various activities, which created the space I needed to truly rest and heal and learn to pay attention to my baby’s needs. For us, that year was (among other things, obviously) a bit of a reset button on our family’s priorities.