Do any of the following sound like you:

1. If you go on a date, sex is expected.

2. You have a Tinder (or any app of the sort).

3. You often skip the date entirely and get right to it.

4. You've had "sexual encounters" with people in your friend circle, decided to pretend it never happened, and then you actually pretend it never happened. You feel like you can go right on being friends exactly like you were before.

5. Knowing your partner physically before you know them emotional is totally normal.

If you agreed with any of these statements, congratulations(?)! You're participating in hookup culture!

We've devolved--not evolved, mind you--into this hookup culture. Hookup culture is, according to Wikipedia, a culture that encourages casual sexual encounters focusing on physical pleasure not necessarily attached to emotional bonding or commitment. I'd like to amend that to "pleasure almost never attached to emotional bonding or commitment."

If this is news to you, if the dating lifestyle your parents or even your one-decade-older friends experienced seems obsolete or weird to you, you need to know that this kind of romantic culture you're in is skewed. It is not natural, it is not effective, it is not what you deserve.

Sex is being horribly misused in our culture. It's being used as a foundation for identity, as pleasure for pleasure's sake, and as a weapon. For years there has been a growing separation between the need for sex and the need for love, and at this point our culture no longer believes they go together at all. In her essay "Breathless: In Defense of Hookup Culture," Karley Sciortino for Vogue magazine claims that the lack of support for open relationships is what's causing people to postpone looking for long-term love in favor of frequent casual sex, as if love and sex no longer belong in the same realm.

This is heartbreaking. Sex is the ultimate expression of love between two people. It's mind AND body AND soul being given in love to another person. Anything less than that is inherently selfish and cheapens the experience. Sex and love, by design, are completely inseparable.

So where is all this coming from? Why now? What changed?

Vanity Fair claims it's "been percolating for hundreds of years," but it's never been expressed in this celebrated capacity before. Many blame dating apps like Tinder for reducing people to exaggerated profiles and edited pictures, but I don't agree. I think hookup culture is a symptom of a much larger problem: lack of intimacy.

This is not "man vs. woman," this is an everybody problem. People are skipping the emotional to get to the physical because we're craving intimacy and we have no idea how to be emotionally intimate anymore. And for that, I blame our tech-saturated culture. We present a version of ourselves to the world and we absorb other people's versions of themselves. With texting, we've created the power to calculate our responses perfectly, effectively altering our reality even further. We've virtually eliminated the need to get to know each other on a personal level, but we're designed for intimacy and sex is the only way we know how to go about it.

So contrary to popular belief, sex is never just sex. You, as a human, are craving to be known and are craving to know another. I can't find a single person who is at all in favor of hookup culture, who wouldn't rather actually date someone before getting in their pants. You've got the power to really change this! Put down the phone, go on dates without the expectation of sex, ask deeper questions that you yourself would appreciate being asked.

I'll say it again: Hookup culture isn't natural. Hookup culture isn't effective. And you deserve so much more.