July 15, 2005

That’s the name of the newest television dating show. For one year, ABC’s news division followed a dozen professional women around New York, recording their attempts to pursue men using Internet dating services.

According to a New York Times review, the show “shines a bright light on the lives of single women who, desperate for love, date many men and sleep around.” It also shines a bright light on why romance is a lost art.

You may remember romance. It was a subtle dance between a man and a woman, the sweet energy that occurred when two opposite natures came together as one.

A chief ingredient of romance was mystery -- the deep interest and natural curiosity a man held for a woman and a woman held for a man. A mysterious female creature had the power to spellbind a man, transform him and make him want to be a much different fellow.

A woman was mysterious to a man and a man to a woman because each was different -- that is both men and women celebrated their differences, whereas now we pretend they don’t exist.

Crooners like Frank Sinatra helped us celebrate mystery and romance, with songs such as “Nice and Easy.”

We’re on the road to romance - that’s safe to say

But let’s make all the stops along the way

The problem now of course is

To simply hold your horses

To rush would be a crime

Cause nice and easy does it every time

But such lyrics were popular long ago, before songs had lyrics such as “do that to me one more time” and “shake your booty” -- before the slow dance of romance was replaced with hooking up.

Hooking up is the opposite of romance. It’s a slang term, or used to be anyhow, that describes an immediate, meaningless physical interaction between a man and a woman. Whereas romance was a dance of the spirit and soul, hooking up is purely biological.

There has always been some hooking up among men and women, to be sure. Despite what we like to believe, our physical longings are no different than they ever were. Our reaction is what has changed.

There used to be a double standard, which wasn’t right. A man who partook in physical interaction for its own sake may have been patted on the back by other men and forgiven by women, but a woman who did so was branded a trollop or a floozy.

Now there are no standards and absolutely no stigma for hooking up. That is why romance is a lost art.

Romance was hopeful -- it focused on the future, on the hopes that one day a special person would enter your life and sweep you off your feet, a person you’d be with forever. It satisfied the heart, soul and body.

Hooking up is cynical -- it focuses on the immediate. It is rooted in doubtfulness, that things likely won’t work out anyhow with someone you just met, so you might as well hook up and get something out of it. It satisfies only the body and only temporarily.

The irony is that as fewer people marry -- nearly half the adults in large cities such as Washington, D.C. are single -- single people long more than ever to find their soul mate. They long for that special person who will bring meaning and happiness to their lives. That’s why Internet dating services are booming and women on television shows are desperately looking for love.

But many never will find a soul mate or a mate of any kind. As romance has been lost, our ability to dance through the clumsiness and awkwardness of dating has been made harder. So we've given up and hooked up. And as hooking up has replaced romance, single folks are becoming more guarded, distant and suspicious. 

Perhaps that’s why the producers gave the newest dating reality such a harsh, cynical name. “Hooking Up” has a better ring to it than some outmoded concept such as “Falling in Love.”

Tom Purcell