Name of Concept
Hookup Culture
Synonyms
Casual sex; College dating; Friends with benefits, Hooking up; Hookups; Modern love
Introduction
Few topics in the field of couple and family therapy trigger judgment and highlight generation gaps like the topic of hookup culture. The term “hookup culture” refers to a zeitgeist that accepts and encourages casual sexual encounters, including one-night stands, which focus on physical intimacy without emotional bonding or longer-term commitment.
Hookup culture is generally associated with Western (particularly American) emerging adults. It is worth noting that it is a historically recent (and somewhat controversial) phenomenon to consider ages 18–25 to be a discrete developmental stage, usually referred to as emerging adulthood (Arnett 2004). This term is intended to capture the protracted transition between adolescence and full-fledged adulthood noted among young people today. Although so-called millennials, today’s emerging adults, are not the...
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Solomon, A.H. (2019). Hookup Culture. In: Lebow, J.L., Chambers, A.L., Breunlin, D.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49425-8_815
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