It seems that easy sex is rampant on college campuses today, but new research reveals that students really want romance.

When Donna Freitas offered a class on dating and spirituality at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, she didn’t know her students would want to change the social scene at the Catholic liberal arts school. But when they learned that none of them liked the culture of casual sex on campus, they decided to create a newspaper discussing “hook-up culture” and got the whole school talking about it.

“It was the most extraordinary experience I ever had as a professor,” Freitas says. “But I also started to wonder: Is it like this elsewhere?”

Her book Sex and the Soul (Oxford) documents what she found surveying 2,500 students and interviewing 111 about religion and sex at seven colleges—Catholic, evangelical, public, and private.

She found casual sex on all but the evangelical campuses, but she also found that students lie about how much sex they have and about liking the culture of casual sex. Worse, college administrations lie by denying that hook-up culture even exists.

“I just finished my 14th year as a teacher, and in my experience, if students are struggling with something, if there is an unmet need, you come up with resources to answer the need,” Freitas says.

The good news, though, is that there is a way out. All it takes, Freitas says, is speaking the truth.

What is a hook-up?
I asked every single person in the study how they defined it, and I learned that a hook-up is any sexually intimate activity—it could be as innocent as kissing or it could be intercourse—but what defines it is that it’s casual, unplanned, with no commitment. It often involves alcohol and little talking.

How prevalent is hooking up on Catholic campuses?
The reality is that Catholic colleges are like secular colleges. Everywhere I’ve been, students say the same thing about hook-up culture. The only exceptions are evangelical schools.

The perception is that everybody hooks up all the time and loves it, but in reality people are hooking up far less than they think others are. A lot of students had one hook-up experience, but that certainly is not rampant. People lie about how much sex they’re having and inflate what’s going on because the social pressure to hook up is really enormous.

There are a few students who really do love hook-up culture. They are the kings and queens of the school—the purveyors of hook-up culture—especially on small campuses, but they are very few and far between.

Is hook-up culture new?
I graduated from Georgetown in 1994, and I knew about hooking up. But it also meant, “Let’s hook up for happy hour.” You knew who the hook-up crowd was, but it wasn’t pervasive.

Now this Animal House, frat-boy behavior is the norm on many campuses. You don’t have to join a frat to go to theme parties where men dress up as “pimps” and women dress as their “whores.” When I was in college, we had events like “preppy” parties, but now there are a number of variations on “pimps and ho’s,” almost all with men in powerful positions and women dressing sexily in subordinate positions. Everywhere I go, students say that everybody goes to these parties.

If most students don’t like hook-up culture, what do they want from relationships?
Almost everyone—regardless of gender or sexual orientation—told me they want old-fashioned romance.

When romance came up, students said it’s talking—just talking for hours, on a pretty beach, over dinner, under a starry sky. They want communication. With hook-up culture any communication that happens tends to be sexual and drunken. That’s not real or romantic to the students.

It’s not that they don’t want to have sex ever or that they want to save sex for marriage—so, parents, don’t get your hopes up. But when they have sex, they want to be in love with that person. They want respect. They want someone to know them. They want hundreds of candles lit. And they don’t want to get there right away. They would like endless nights of romance first.

Then there’s sadness and remorse that they have no idea how to get what they want. They feel like it’s crazy to feel this way, and they’re embarrassed to admit it.

Basics like asking somebody out seem impossible to them. A few actually told me it’s much easier to have sex with someone than to ask him or her out.

Students are left hoping that if you hook up with somebody often enough, maybe eventually they’ll realize they like you, and you’ll get into a relationship. That’s why a lot of women say they hook up.

Is there a difference in the way young men and women perceive hook-up culture?
People think girls have become frat boys. Ariel Levy in Female Chauvinist Pigs (Free Press) talks about how this is, again, about the difference between perception and reality. The myth today is that all women love sex and porn.

But when Levy sat down with women alone, she heard that they’re actually really unsettled by that attitude. They feel ashamed and uncomfortable. That’s what I found as well.

I taught a course on my study last year, and I had the most left-wing students you can imagine. Their favorite book was A Return to Modesty (Free Press) by Wendy Shalit, who wrote the book right out of college. She turned to Orthodox Judaism and its modesty laws as a way out of hook-up culture. She talks about modesty being a virtue and about drawing boundaries.

My students didn’t know they could have boundaries other than at sexual assault and rape. They felt they had to go along with behavior that made them uncomfortable.

The other piece is that, with a very few exceptions, guys don’t like hook-up culture either. They don’t want to rack up their number of sexual partners. They feel it gets in the way of real relationships. But there is a stigma among guys about critiquing hook-up culture. Expressing an interest in romance or dating is a mark against them, while hooking up is how they prove their masculinity to other guys. They felt trapped as well.

Why don’t students feel they can change their own behavior?
The issue is that hook-up culture rules the day. The social ethic is so powerful that students are afraid to say anything against it.