It’s official: Men prefer ‘hooking up’ to dating, women go for relationships

WASHINGTON - Given an option, men prefer one-night stand (’hooking up’) to dating, while women prefer dating with the prospect of a relationship to causal sex, a new study has shown.

During the study, Carolyn Bradshaw of James Madison University in Virginia, US, and colleagues exposed 150 female and 71 male college students to a variety of situations involving dating - when the man asks a women on a date and the woman accepts or rejects any sexual overtures and there is the prospect of a relationship - or hooking up -a casual sexual encounter between strangers or brief acquaintances.

The researchers found that women seemed to want a relationship more than men, but women fear, whether dating or in hooking up, they will become emotionally attached to a partner not interested in them.

The study also found men seemed to value independence and they feared that even in hooking up, a woman might want to have a relationship.

Also, the researchers found that 41 percent of the women strongly preferred traditional dating to hooking up, 20 percent of the men strongly preferred dating, while 2 percent of the women strongly preferred hooking up and 17 percent of the men strongly preferred hooking up.

The findings are published online in Springer’s journal Sex Roles. (ANI)