What's your definition of a hook-up? A few teens give us their opinions.

There are unspoken rules if you're going to hook up. If you want it to be a hookup relationship, then you don't call the person for anything except plans to hook up. You don't invite them out with you. You don't call just to say hi. You don't confuse the matter. You just keep it purely sexual, and that way people don't have mixed expectations, and no one gets hurt. But is that truly the case for hook ups today? Does everyone win in this game of no-nonsense sexual fun?

Hooking up has come to define sexual relationships for most of today’s teens and young women. It can mean anything from kissing and touching to oral sex or intercourse. Vagueness is its hallmark. A girl can say, “I hooked up with so-and-so,” and no one knows what she did. It protects you and makes you a player at the same time. In a recent survey, 75% of teens agreed that a “hook up” is “when a girl and a guy get together for a physical encounter and don't necessarily expect anything further.”

Hooking up has become the popular term for having casual sexual encounters within a circle of friends, or even with newly met “friends”, with no string attached. No commitment, no promises, just friends. The term itself is vague -- covering everything from kissing to intercourse -- though it is sometimes a euphemism for oral sex, performed by a girl on a boy.

Within a circle of peers, this is often also called "friends with benefits" - friends with whom kids as young as 12 and 13 (but most prevalent between ages 15 and 20) go after some form of sexual satisfaction without making commitments to each other for an ongoing dating relationship. The teens sometimes also have an unspoken code that they are not to reveal their true feelings for the other person. By the end of senior year, the average college student has had 6.9 hooksups, mostly after a “good bit of drinking,” according to a survey of 4,000 students by Stanford University.

Whatever Happened to Dating?

Back in the Dating Era, young couples would go out for a movie or dinner. The expectation was that dating, as with courtship, would ultimately lead to a relationship, the capstone of which was marriage. Precious few of these young women attended college. According to experts, the main reason hooking up is so popular among young people is that in the United States and other Western countries is that the age at which people marry for the first time has been steadily creeping up. As of 2005, in the US, men married for the first time around the age of 27, and women at about 25 years of age.

The hookup is what happens when high school seniors and college freshmen suddenly begin to realize they won't be marrying for five, 10 or 15 years. Hooking up existed long before instant messaging, Facebook or text messaging became part of how young people interact. However, these forms of communication do make it increasingly easy for students to interact in a more informal way. For example, in the dating era, interaction was very formal and required a certain amount of planning. Typically, a man placed a phone call to a woman several days in advance to ask her on a date to a specific place at a specific time. In the contemporary hookup culture, activity is much more spur-of-the-moment and casual. Tools like text messaging allow students to get in touch “late night” with potential hookup partners to meet up if they did not happen to run into one another at a party or bar in the course of the evening. Cellphones and the Internet, which offer teenagers an unparalleled level of privacy, make hooking up that much easier, whether they live in New York City or Boise.

And yet, still, many date. Or sort of, falling out of romantic relationships into hookups and back again. When teenagers do date, they often do so in ways that would be unrecognizable to their parents, or even to their older siblings. A “formal date” might be a trip to the mall with a date and some friends. Teenagers regularly flirt online first, and then decide whether to do so in real life. Dating someone from your school is considered by many to be risky, akin to seeing someone from the office, so teenagers tend to look to nearby schools or towns, whether they’re hoping to date or just to hook up. However, if heartbreaks and relationships taught girls and boys anything, it's that high school is no place for romantic relationships. They're complicated, messy and invariably painful. Hooking up, when done ''right'' is exciting, sexually validating and efficient. Afterall, the sentiment felt by many teens is that if there's no one good to date, why date at all?

All Smoke and Mirror?

Hooking up is very much a male-dominated scene. Hooking up let boys get physical pleasure without the emotional connection. For many teen girls, it’s not the same. It’s difficult for girls to detach themselves emotionally from the physical acts. Certainly, there are certainly many cases where a girl does not want a hookup to evolve into a relationship, but on average girls are far more interested in a hookup turning into “something more” than boys are. They want the call the next day. While boys appear more passive and take less initiative in pursuing relationships than in the past, boys have much of the power in high school and college relationships.  After a hook up, the boy typically decides if something more will happen.  After a boy and girl become sexually involved and spend a lot of time together, it is usually the girl who has to ask (and risk rejection) whether they are officially in a relationship. When she asks the question, he decides.

Among the young, who typically do not yet know how to establish equality or mutuality in relationships, friends with benefits frequently functions to service the physical needs of boys while overlooking the more subtle emotional needs of girls. Women are pretty much wired to form emotional attachments to men they are intimate with. That's why having friends with benefits can get confusing. You feel attached to him, expect him to feel the same about you and so you want him to demonstrate some caring, certainly by not being overly affectionate with other girls. But he won't even recognize a relationship. Result: You're distressed. It's not the sex that makes friends with benefits a bad bargain for young women; it's the nature of the deal—lack of equal emotional involvement of the partners.