Last weekend, I found myself staring at a couple in a bar on Marshall Street.

The girl was perched on the bar, her legs wrapped around the guy’s waist, making out with him like it was going out of style. I was a little freaked out watching them. I mean, come on people, this is a bar.

A few days later the image was still stuck in my head. I started to wonder if I was the only one taken back by this raunchy display. What happened to me? I didn’t used to be this bothered by public displays of affection. I decided to ask some friends.

‘I would never randomly make out with people at the bars,’ agreed senior J.

So it’s not just me.

Another senior, S, said she witnessed a couple making out at a frat party last weekend.

‘It bothered me,’ she said. ‘It was gross. I guess I’m just more mature now.’

Rewind three years. Three things I always anticipated walking into a house party or a frat party: dim lights, pounding music and people feverishly making out everywhere I looked. Obnoxious PDAs seemed completely normal to me then. Now, they make me want to vomit.

Many girls I talked to admitted that now that they’re older, their desire for random hookups has died down. One said that when she was a freshman, she would constantly think about guys. It made her feel better about herself when she was hooking up with someone.

‘I would take everything guys said so seriously when I was younger, but now I know they’re just trying to get laid,’ J said.

So girls are hooking up less as they get older. This has to mean that guys are, too.

Wrong.

The guys I talked to seem to agree that their number of hookups has stayed the same since freshman year or, in most cases, increased. But why the difference between guys and girls? 

‘Senior girls have caught on to the rouse,’ said J, a male senior. ‘That’s why when I’m looking to hook up with a girl, I’m not going after a stuck up junior or senior. I’m going after that freshman or sophomore who’s still in that mentality of ‘I want to get laid.”

So it seems that as girls mature, they decide they don’t want flimsy flings as much as they did when they were younger. They are more secure with themselves and don’t need a guy to make them feel confident. Guys see that the girls their age aren’t looking for one night stands anymore, so they go after the younger girls who are.

Kind of reminds me of that line from ‘Dazed and Confused,’ when David Wooderson says, ‘That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.’

Rita Kokshanian is a senior magazine journalism major. Her column appears every Thursday. She can be reached at rhkoksha@syr.edu.

Published on September 7, 2011 at 12:00 pm