"Children learn what they live," Dorothy Law Nolte so famously observed in her poem, written over sixty years ago, long before the digital age when the computer named Univac was the size of a room and weighed 13 tons.
The sentence floats into my head as I sit on a crowded bus in Manhattan on a rainy winter day. Across the aisle is a young mother—a Millennial, I'm guessing—with a baby in her lap. He's probably a little over a year old, not yet walking since he's dressed in a snow suit and booty socks. A woman I take to be her sister is sitting adjacent, the stroller leaning against her knees. She's texting as the two of them talk. The baby is facing out, staring at the motley crew of strangers.
A few minutes pass and, suddenly, the baby begins to fidget. The mom loosens his snowsuit and continues her conversation. Ignored, the baby starts to cry. She bounces him on her knee, but now he's bawling, his face red and tears running down his face. She takes off his hat but it changes nothing and he starts kicking in frustration. A look of desperation on her face, the mother grabs the iPhone out of her sister's hands and flashes it front of the baby's face. He catches his breath, and starts running his fingers over the screen. As the images flicker, he begins to calm down and his mother goes back to talking while her sister texts. The whole episode­ probably takes five minutes start to finish—long enough for all the other people on the bus—but the mother neither turns the baby toward her nor does she cuddle him. She chooses to distract rather than comfort him. What has he learned about relationships in this exchange?
The Millennials weren't handed iPhones, of course, but that doesn't mean they didn't learn about relationships from their parents. So I have to ask the question: How does the hookup connect to lessons learned at home? Is it a consequence of the high rate of divorce, a history of intimacy gone bad? (Only 60% percent of Millennials were raised by two parents.) Does the hookup reflect how kids are sometimes conscripted to take sides in the battle of divorce? Is there safety in not committing and hooking up instead? How does the hookup relate to the marriage that stays together but hits a rough patch, maybe a very bad one? Is it the confessional nature of the age we live in, where some parents are quick to over-share the details of their intimate lives, while others want to be friends with their children, rather than their parents, whether they stay married or not? Have the Boomers given intimacy and marriage a bad rep?
One Millennial, age 28, is blunt as she describes why the hookup appealed to her: "Group socializing in college was the norm. I had a really tight group of girlfriends and we'd all go to parties together. I was the one most likely to be on the prowl for a hookup. Even though I thought I really wanted a real relationship, I actually preferred the no-strings-attached thing. It was easy. I could be drunk so I didn't overthink everything, and it gave me a confidence boost — not to mention great stories to tell my girlfriends the next morning at breakfast. Because, of course, I never talked to any of these guys again; most of them became punch lines in our running inside jokes."
She absolutely connects the comfort zone she found in hooking up with her parents' marriage which imploded just as she hit puberty when it was revealed that her father had been having a long-term affair at work. "It was a messy, brutal time in my family. I saw my parents fight and scheme. I heard about the woman. I watched my mother stop eating because she felt so rejected and insecure. And then I watched her try to look sexy to win my father back. My first impressions of sex and relationship were dark and forbidding. I learned that men wanted sexiness and, if you couldn't give them that, they would break your heart and leave you."
Her parents' marriage survived, by the way, and so did she. And even though her relationship began as a hookup, it's lasted six years and she's getting married in a few months.
Another young woman, 24, says the hookup gives her a sense of power. "My parents are married but my father absolutely dominates her. She's voiceless and always has been and I absolutely don't want that for myself. I think hooking up lets me do the choosing, gives me control. I can act like a guy." This may be what she feels, but there's plenty of evidence that the hookup—with its infusion of alcohol and a very real possibility of unsafe sex, not to mention sexual coercion—isn't empowering for women at all.
I discover that Millennials whose parents are divorced aren't more cynical about marriage or commitment than their peers whose families are intact; in fact, they are sometimes more optimistic, especially when the divorce was relatively civilized or took place early in their lives. "My dad left when I was two. I never had a firsthand experience of watching my parents work things out but that actually motivates me. I want the long haul and I work at our relationship, harder than I might otherwise, and I expect the same of him," says a twenty-eight-year-old, getting married this year. It's worth saying that the older Millennials- those who are 29, rather than 22 or 24 -haven't been as affected by the intrusion of technology into their development or their relationships. They went to college without Facebook (the first class to have it for four years was 2008), didn't get cell phones until they were in their late teens, and still prefer the phone to texting. Converseely, teenagers—the as-yet-unnamed group slightly younger than the Millennials—are more affected.
A long-term marriage isn't always inspirational, as I learn from both Millennial men and women. One thirty-year-old, whose parents have been married for over three decades, muses: "I've had to consciously imagine a marriage where I would really enjoy being around my partner most of the time, where we'd be actively happy together. I was talking to another single friend about promising to stay with someone 'forever' and I think I could promise to give it my all for as long as I could but I don't think I would commit to the word 'forever.' I think my parents have accomplished something being together—staying in it, no matter what—but that's not something I want for myself." Did her parents "over-share?" She admits that her mother definitely did. She was in a three-year relationship—"he didn't know where he was going in life and I have fixed my goals and that made both of us unhappy"—and now she's back to meeting people and, yes, hooking up now and again. Another thirty-year-old confides that while he's had a few relationships in the eight years since college, they both lasted under a year. "I guess I'm not ready for more, yet. I still want to have fun, not a wife. My parents married really young and, well, I don't think they're all that happy. I really don't."
The old playground taunt—Dick and Jane sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-NG/ First comes love, then comes marriage/ Here comes Jane with a baby carriage—and the order of events it implied aren't, according to the Pew Center Research, part of the Millennial scene. Only 30% of them rank having a successful marriage as one of their life priorities. (I ask the same question of my interviewees and it's low on a list of ten. Parenting ranks high, though, as it does in the Pew study. 52% of Millennials list being a good parent as a priority.). That said, while 70% of them think they want to get married, a robust 25% of them aren't sure and a full 5% say they don't want to marry at all,
Children do learn what they live and it appears the phenomenon of the hookup isn't precisely an accident.
