In another thread I was presented with an interesting study. I think it might be behind a paywall but here's the link anyway. It's asking a few hundred college students (average age of 19) about their hook up experiences. I found a number of interesting points here, which I will highlight.

  • Out of 1000 students, 300 reported being in a LTR for the last year, and an additional 200 reported not having hookups despite being single. This study focuses on the 500 students who did have at least one hookup during the last year. 60% of women and 75% of men reported having at least one hookup during the last year.

  • 40% of reported hookups did not involve oral, anal, or vaginal sex.

  • 65% of women said they hoped their hookup would lead to a relationship. It's not clear if they were asking if the woman ever caught feels during a hookup, or if they were talking about the most recent encounter. Big distinction. One implies 65% of encounters have the woman catching feels. The other implies 65% of women have ever caught feels, and the number of encounters where the woman catches feels is necessarily less.

  • 45% of men said yes to the same question, meaning it's pretty common for men to catch feels too.

  • Men report on average 3 hook up partners in a year, while women report 1.

  • Men were only mildly more likely to report positive experiences from their hookups. In quantifiable terms, men were a half standard deviation happier.

  • Conversely, women were a third of a standard deviation more likely to be unhappy with their hookup.

  • On a scale from 1-5 with 5 being very unhappy with their hookup, the average score for men was 2.14. We usually view men as always happy with casual sex, but a fair bit seem to be unhappy. I wonder why.

  • When asked how often people used condoms in their hookups, with 1 being never and 5 being always, the average response was 3.84. But they are counting oral sex here, so maybe that is dropping the average down.

Some questions. 45% 35% of women don't want the hookup to turn into anything more. This runs counter to the common belief that all women want to date their hookups. If you hold this belief, what do you make of it?

It seems a fair bit of men are unhappy with their hookup encounters. Anyone care to speculate why? Is it because 40% if hookups didn't involve what most would consider sex? Or is it the result of drunken sex ending with vomit? Or do men have higher expectations for sex than commonly portrayed?

Other thoughts?