Love's Labor's Lost

These things are essential to being happily married and raising children, both of which young women say they want someday. They are best learned within a romantic relationship, in Blum's view, because the young person is motivated by the romance to learn them.

Lloyd Kolbe, a health education professor at Indiana University-Bloomington, agrees. He still remembers his first love in high school, how he worked at being honest, decent and caring -- in short, worthy of her.

"Hooking up is purposely uncaring," he says. "If they turn off the emotional spigot when they're young, what will happen to them as older adults?"

The Decline of Love

In some ways young women are riding a to-hell-with-love wave that started building more than a lifetime ago. By the 1930s, following more than a century of discourse on the concepts of passion, courtship and romantic marriages, scientists were declaring love the stuff of childhood fantasies and sentimental women. Psychotherapist Alfred Adler was one, arguing in Esquire magazine for rational, cooperative marriages that aimed for companionship rather than emotional connectedness.

Later, feminists like Marilyn French wrote that women couldn't love deeply and live independent, meaningful lives. (A character in French's popular 1977 novel "The Women's Room" called love a lie to keep women happy in the kitchen.) Many young women at the time found themselves agreeing with French, at least partly. This didn't stop them from dating and getting married. But they did so with a cautious attitude toward love that is even more evident in their daughters, especially those in college.

A college senior from Dallas with deep brown eyes and thick hair to match was describing a man she had hooked up with a couple of times. Despite her best efforts, she said, she was falling for him and that worried her.

"It will suck if it's bad," she said, "but it will suck even more if it's good."

She explained: Her number-one goal, for as long as she could remember, was to excel in school so that she might someday land a great job that would make her financially independent. In high school, she maintained an A average, played volleyball and rowed crew, edited the digital yearbook and played on a church basketball team that won the state championship. Her pace in college was similarly brisk, and she didn't see how, even in her senior year, she could afford to invest time, energy and emotion in a loving relationship.

At her 21st birthday party she talked about this with a girlfriend who understood. As the friend said, over the recorded sounds of rapper Jay-Z, "I don't have time or energy to worry about a 'we.' "

College is about many things: learning to read Chinese, write poetry, solve complicated physics problems. It's also about learning how to build relationships with others: how to be a "we" with a roommate you can't stand at first, a classmate whose political persuasion is different, and, significantly, with an intimate partner or two.

It would not have occurred to many mothers of this generation that when they were in college, they couldn't have it all including romance. But their daughters wonder.

Their reluctance is not irrational.