When students are expected to hook up with lots of people, doing so becomes dutiful, not daring. Older ideas of sexual exploration — be it same-sex encounters or one-night stands — have become a basic expectation.

Of the 1,230 students who answered an optional survey question in a study I conducted asking what their peers thought about sex in 2006, 45 percent of participants at Catholic schools and 36 percent at nonreligious private and public schools said their peers were too casual about sex, and they said privately that they wished this weren’t the case. An additional 35 percent at Catholic and 42 percent at nonreligious schools reported that their peers were simply “casual,” without opining one way or the other.

Of students who reported hooking up, 41 percent used words such as “regretful,” “empty,” “miserable,” “disgusted,” “ashamed,” “duped” and even “abused” to describe the experience. An additional 23 percent expressed ambivalence, and the remaining 36 percent said they were more or less “fine” with hookups — “fine” being the most common description.

Aside from the few students who said hooking up made them happy, the vast majority used less-than-glowing adjectives such as “whatever” and “mostly okay,” or were indifferent about it. What’s more, during one-on-one interviews, many said that even if they don’t like hooking up, they pretend they do because it’s such a big part of campus social life. They want to fit in.