We are all college students attempting to balance the immense amount of school work, extracurricular activities, friends, and/or even work in our daily lives. We also attempt to include a relationship into our hectic lives, but even a relationship can be hard to manage. So instead, some of us turn to hooking up, which in turn relieves stress in many ways and gives a short term form of self-gratification. Even this gratification eventually fades, still creating a yearning for something more intimate. However, being a Millennial makes us bound to certain unspoken mannerisms. But what is a Millennial? And why does this generational title influence our outlook on relationships and its sustainability?

What are Millennials?

Millennials are a generation of kids/adults born from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. Being a part of this generation, our relationship with our parents has always been unique. We have always been coddled and this has slowly affected our adulthood. When our parents became by and lard successful, they told us we could everything and that the sky was the limit. The main attitude of a Millennial is not so much “I deserve it” but rather “I can have it.” This mentality presents an abundance of choices in multiple topics such as: career possibilities, sexual partners, and gender orientations. The basic notion is that the amount of choices will promptly help us succeed, it instead does the counter effect and causes stress. The overabundance of choices paralyzes some people, inducing stress/anxiety, and comes down to what if I make the wrong decision?

The large amount of opportunities translates to being a cause for millennials being one of the most stressed out generations. The American Psychological Association, in 2014, found that millennials report more stress than any other generation. Thirty-six percent reported increased stress in the past year, and college students specifically are more anxious than ever before. From the same stress report, more than half of millennials say that have lain awake at night in the past month due to the colossal amount of stress. The stress can be translated into anxiety, which occurs due to the overlying thought of what could have been and the ones that got away in any type of decision. We simply are indecisive, as we want to achieve perfection, or a something that mirrors perfection. But when an error occurs, we overthink and stress about the other possibilities that could have been chosen. This affects relationships and the overarching need to acquire a “Nicholas Sparks” type of love.

Millennials in Different Forms of Relationships

“Hooking up” is an ambiguous term that can signify anything from making out to sex, without the emotional entanglement of a relationship. This is becoming a prevalent theme throughout many millennial relationships. In the case of overstressed college students, many have positioned themselves where achieving a meaningful relationship is not fruitful.The New York Times says that, “hooking up is a functional strategy for today’s hard charging ambitious young women, allowing them to have enjoyable sex lives while focusing most of their energy on academic and professional goals.”

Online dating apps like Tinder, OkCupid, and Eharmony are being used more frequently to aid hook up culture.According to Psychology Today, in 2014, a study was conducted that found that one in five adults between 25-34 years old have used online dating services. There are more than 2,500 online dating services in the U.S. alone, with 1,000 new options every year. 8% of taken 18-29 year olds met their partner online.

Dating online is not always the best way to find a meaningful relationship. Many online daters lie on their profiles, with 54% of online daters reporting meeting someone who seriously misrepresented themselves in their profile. Online daters are very picky, eliminating potential partners based on everything from the shows they watch to their political views. For some, the hardest part of online dating is seeing all the people who seem pretty good. However, you are observing a person through the lens of a profile, it is all a virtual experience that makes it seem lazier to go out and meet potential matches in real life.

Beta-Marriages

Time magazine says that testing a marriage, like we test a username, might be logical. A survey conducted with 1,000 millennials talked about their views on marriage. Almost half of millennials, 43% said they would support a marriage model that involved a two-year trial; at which point the union could be either formalized or dissolved, no divorce paperwork required. 33% said they would be open to trying what researchers dubbed “the real estate” approach, marriage licenses granted on a track of five, seven, to ten, and then thirty years in the relationship. 21% said they would give the “presidential” method a try, whereby marriage vows last for four years, but after eight you can elect to choose a new partner. It is not that millennials are entirely noncommittal, they are just open to change. Millennials are just trying to avoid failure. Millennials are not scared of commitment, we are just trying to do commitment more wisely.

Relationships are confusing and difficult to maintain, and being a millennial places us in a unique category of dating. Marriage is very terrifying, it is probably the biggest leap of faith you will ever make. So many of us turn to hooking up, or when something works, let it work. We are all different, but are still somehow tied to this tendency of being a millennial. And the only bad part is that we think we are entitled to things, but we a deserving of things that can progress us in life. Be in any type of healthy relationship that progresses you.