Men prefer ‘hooking up’ to dating, women go for relationships

Washington: Given an option, men prefer one-night stand (‘hooking up’) to dating, while women prefer dating with the prospect of a relationship to causal sex, a new study has shown.

During the study, Carolyn Bradshaw of James Madison University in Virginia, US, and colleagues exposed 150 female and 71 male college students to a variety of situations involving dating – when the man asks a women on a date and the woman accepts or rejects any sexual overtures and there is the prospect of a relationship – or hooking up –a casual sexual encounter between strangers or brief acquaintances. The researchers found that women seemed to want a relationship more than men, but women fear, whether dating or in hooking up, they will become emotionally attached to a partner not interested in them. The study also found men seemed to value independence and they feared that even in hooking up, a woman might want to have a relationship. Also, the researchers found that 41 percent of the women strongly preferred traditional dating to hooking up, 20 percent of the men strongly preferred dating, while 2 percent of the women strongly preferred hooking up and 17 percent of the men strongly preferred hooking up. The findings are published online in Springer’s journal Sex Roles. ANI