Are Hookups Bad for your Mental Health?

A few one night stands are nothing more than harmless fun, right? Not always, one Nottingham student argues, as they share their views on casual sex at university and the potentially damaging effects they can have on one’s mental health.

Let’s face it, whilst at university, many of us will have casual sex. For many students, hook-ups are just part of the university experience. In film and television, having casual sex in your younger years is glorified and sought after. The idea of having sex with lots of people at university is so ingrained in how we view the student experience that many people end relationships before heading off to university so they can ‘experiment’. Hook-ups are often seen as thrilling, fulfilling and liberating. However, the reality of having multiple casual hookups can sometimes be a lot less glamorous (and a lot more problematic) than what it’s presented to be.

My own experience of hook-up culture is one that mostly fits with the latter description. I found it all too easy to get swept up in the idea that it was ‘exciting’ and what I was ‘meant to be doing’. I broke up with my boyfriend in first year, deciding to explore new relationships and preferring to be single whilst completing my degree. What followed was an extremely mixed bag of experiences. They ranged from drunken sex that I can barely remember, to sex with friends, to sex with someone I thought I was in love with, and even sex that sat in the grey area of consent.

Whilst I believe that it’s important to have a variety of encounters in order to fully understand yourself sexually, I also believe that the normalisation of hook-ups allows a lot of abnormal sexual behaviours to be swept under the carpet. The effect casual sex can have on your mental health is also rarely talked about. Hook-ups can result in feelings of shame, embarrassment, remorse or lack of selfawareness (all of which I have fallen victim to at least once). This may be because having a lot of sex is seen as something to be praised. As a sign that you’re having a good time. I, like all too many others, have used sex as a form of validation in the past. This can be a particularly slippery slope in the university environment, where the line between normal human interaction and sex is often blurred. It can leave you wondering whether someone is showing you genuine interest, or just trying to achieve an easy shag.

It’s easy to forget to take care of yourself. It’s easy to forget that casual sex can impact your self-esteem. In Psychology Today, Dr Susan Whitbourne explored the negative effects casual sex can have on students’ mental health via a study of 3,900 undergraduates on 30 university campuses across the US. Her research found that people who engaged in frequent hook-ups had greater psychological distress. Participants having casual sex were said to have “lower levels of selfesteem, life satisfaction, and happiness”, as well as higher scores of depression and anxiety.

It is, however, hard to decipher the cause-andeffect relationship between poor mental health and casual sex. It’s a bit like asking: what came first, the chicken or the egg? And, there are a myriad of other factors that stretch and contort a student’s mental well-being. All I can say is that we all need to take more care of ourselves when it comes to hookups: we know how to practice safe sex physically, but the lines have become more and more blurred when it comes to practicing safe sex mentally.

By Anonymous Page Design by Chiara Crompton