To support my point that Hookup Culture doesn’t just go away even when people leave a college campus for the “real world”, I’m going to make a claim for which I have no actual evidence or support other than the fact that it makes intuitive sense to me: “ghosting”* is not a random or accidental or even super-mysterious trend—it’s the natural, entirely-predictable result of a central tenet of Hookup Culture being applied to “real-world” dating. Hookup Culture actively discourages communication, on-going interaction, acknowledgment of another person’s internal emotional world. I would argue it’s impossible to get “ghosted” in Hookup Culture, because ghosting is the absence of communication when there’s the assumption that there should be communication; within Hookup Culture, that absence of communication isn’t a bug in the software… it’s a feature.
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Comparing Consensual Non-Monogamy and Hookup Culture
Many of the individuals who participate in Hookup Culture aren’t giving up on wanting both emotionality and sexuality… they’re often just deferring that desire. And deferring that desire to engage all off the parts of themselves rather than just some parts allows people to keep stepping back into Hookup Culture, even if there are some times that they come away from it feeling like they’ve been treated more like a hyper-realistic sex doll.