A College Survival Guide to Hookups, Dating, and Staying Safe.

College poses many new obstacles and experiences for all wide eyed girls and boys when they’re moving in on the first day. Your resident advisor will probably give you a speech about sexual assault, they may even throw a statistic or two at you. You’ll probably go to some sort of presentation where they act out a few different scenarios of typical college conflicts usually involving friends, boyfriends, drugs and alcohol and they’ll tell you how to deal with each situation. If you’re lucky like I was, they’ll throw chocolate flavored condoms at you, you know the free ones from Health Services that no one ever uses because they’re tight, annoying, and will probably break. I sat there at all those presentations wondering why they stressed it so much, I mean I get that some people get roofied at frat parties or some people don’t know when to get help for alcohol poisoning but at the time it seemed to be overkill. Spoiler alert: it’s not. Though how frequently they stressed the importance of consent, they left out a lot. So here’s the hooking up, dating, and staying safe survival guide to college.

Hookups

The guide to hookups is a hard one, pun intended. Considering everyone handles hookups in different manners it’s not easy to give a step by step on how to deal with them but I’ll give it a shot.

First off you don’t have to hook up with people. There’s a big pressure to be having sex and if you’re not for whatever reason you might feel left out or immature or even unwanted. Let me tell you it’s no big deal and it’s nobody’s business who or what you do or don’t do in-between your Home Goods twin XL sheets. It doesn’t make you different or weird, it’s just a preference.

Secondly, you can hook up with as many people as you want if you’re staying safe and you’re doing it for yourself. Don’t let anyone make you feel bad about your sexual choices, it’s your body and your sex, do it how you want with whomever you want unapologetically. Your sexual partners don’t define you.

Lastly, it’s really easy to get caught up in hookups and make them out to be way more than they are. Take it from the queen of this. The best thing to do is to figure out exactly what you want out of a boy or girl and make sure you communicate that with them. This poses more of a challenge than you would think, but mentioning you’d just like sex or you’d like a bit more than that is really important. Remember that most people are pretty clueless so you might have to spell it out. If you’re getting attached to people who just want to have sex with you, maybe it’s time you respect what they want out of it and find someone who’s on the same page as you. Remember random hookups or few time things aren’t for everyone, and that’s super okay. I promise you there are plenty of others who are looking for the same things you are, just keep looking.

Also: respect you’re roommate(s) if you have them. You’d be surprised how many people have told me they’ve had sex with their roommates in the room sleeping (some have even been awake for it). Unless they’re into it and say you can: don’t. It’s super uncool and gross. No hookup is worth disrespecting your roommate over.

Dating

Here’s something they don’t tell you: a lot college freshman end up getting in relationships the first few weeks of school. This may not be for every school but it certainly happened at mine. People formed friend groups and within the friend groups couples would form. Now I’m not saying dating in college, especially at the very beginning, is a bad idea, but you should be careful. In high school not as many people date because well most people have been going to school with the same kids since kindergarten. You know them, your friends know them, your parents might have even known them. Overall you know everyone’s reputation, which may not be so appealing no matter how cute they are.

Whereas college is the nice clean slate some people don’t deserve. No one knows about how that kid punched his last girlfriends or how that girl gets handsy when drunk. It might be a good idea to test out the waters and get to know them before you put your trust in. Being in relationships can also make you miss out on a lot of cool memories and friendships. I highly advise that if you do decide to date you make sure you have a life outside of them and your whole college experience isn’t based on this one person. So many couples that seriously need to break up wont because they’re in the same friend group and “I don’t know how to do college without them.” You’ll realize that you are only friends with some people due to proximity, try and branch out past your hallway a bit. The most significant part of college is your new found independence, make sure you use it and don’t become dependent on anyone, from boyfriends to girlfriends to roommates to friends.

Staying Safe

Overall this is the most important thing you will learn in college. There are millions of ways to stay safe, so I’ll highlight the key ones.

Watch what you drink. Watch how much you drink, where your drink is, and try to drink out of things with caps. I can’t stress this enough. A lot of people start drinking in college so they don’t know their limits. Know your limits, if you don’t: start off small, its way better to find out what’s too little than to find out what’s far too much. If you tend to over drink make sure you don’t bring out more than you need.

Remember you don’t know anyone at your school, even your friends you don’t really know. A lot of people get sexually assaulted by people they’ve put their trust in.

Always make sure you have a way home, and that you never go anywhere alone. Never Uber alone and never walk alone.

USE CONDOMS. I know it doesn’t feel as good and you might be on birth control and he seems to have a strong pull out game but you have no idea if they have an STD or not. Also “looking clean” isn’t a good measure of their sexual health.

Finally remember that during orientation when they tell you 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted before they graduate, they’re serious. You’re not an exception. We all sat there and thought “that won’t happen to me I’m smart” and I’m here to tell you it can happen to anyone no matter how careful you are. So please stay safe.