Welcome to the post-dating world; gone are the days of dinners, movies and the nerve-wracking telephone call.

What happened to the flowers and the romantic meals, you ask? Theyve been replaced by the two hs hanging out and hooking up.

The new landscape of this post-dating world is causal, noncommittal and often alcohol-induced.

Instead of a pre-arranged one-on-one rendezvous, its all about the late night text or the booty call.

Sociologist Paula England of Stanford University researches this new dynamic of no-strings-attached hookups on college campuses.

Its worth noting that hooking up is an ambiguous term it can mean anything from kissing to having sex.

According to Englands data that was published in USA Today, by senior year of college 72 percent of both sexes had a minimum of one hookup or one one-night stand.

The average number of hookups for men were 9.7 and 7.1 for women, while 24 percent said that they are virgins.

This is an interesting change from prior years. On one hand, the number of people saying that they often hook up has increased, while the number of men and women who say that they are virgins has increased as well.

In 2002, 19 percent of college students said they were virgins, compared to 24 percent in 2011 according to the Daily Mail.

Experts say that this trend of more virgins and also more hookups reflects the mindsets of busy students in that they either want to wait for the right time and the right person to make a commitment to, or want to have one-time flings to de-stress.

Numbers aside, it is interesting to consider the emotional aspect of all of this detachment and ambiguity.

There is something to be said for carefree hookups, but at some point you have to wonder what it says about our generation.

We already live disconnected lives. We text instead of call, and often do so in the presence of friends.

We put up walls of technology that place barriers between who we are and who we want to be perceived as.

Instead of forming genuine emotional connections with people, we flit from person to person.

Dating does not have to be viewed as a long term, binding commitment.

It is simply more about connecting with someone on a deeper level, opposed to the drunken one-night stand.

Since our generation is so accustomed to hookup culture, most have no idea how to move away from the ambiguous territory into something more permanent.

Many college students have never been on a conventional date before says Donna Freitas, author of the upcoming book The End of Sex, and are unsure how to escape hookup culture.

Standards must be raised to save dating from becoming an extinct art form.

Going to the movies, dinner or for coffee is just a date, not the call of wedding bells.

And even though there are more females at universities does not mean that men can slack off.

Hookup culture is here to stay for the majority of college students, but that does not mean that experiencing an actual date would hurt anyone.

In fact, you might have more fulfilling interactions with the person sitting across from you than with the random drunk person you met at a party.