How the Hooked Up Generation Feels About Hooking Up

The title of my book Hooked Up: A New Generation’s Surprising Take on Sex, Politics and Saving the World has an obvious sexual ambiguity. Young people are not only hooked on the Internet, hooked together by the Internet, but they’re hooking up in relationship to find and manage through the Internet. And those relationships more and more are very short term and I think if we really want to understand the context of today’s “hooked up” generation it is that short term relationships define them.  

They’re very focused on their future.  They’re heads are down.  They realize how difficult and challenging the future is going to be.  They’re working hard.  They’re focused on their futures and in that context the last thing they really want or need are long-term relationships, whether they be interpersonal relationships or whether they be relationships with marketers or media or any other parts of their lives.  

They’re really focused on what they need to do today to be successful, to build their careers, to establish themselves for the future, to meet the challenges that they’re being confronted with and to hook up in relationships that serve their short-term needs and delaying the long term commitments until later in life.

They are interested in marriage.  They are interested in children, but the women especially are saying they’re looking to their late 20s, early 30s to really begin focusing on the long-term relationships in their lives

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.