By Alison Hillhouse,  MTV Insights

It seems everyone these days is bemoaning the state of 20-something relationships, from The Atlantic to the New York Times to Thought Catalog. Just this weekend, the NY Times published The End of Courtship,lamenting that hook-up culture has replaced traditional dating. MTV’s audience agrees – in fact, 8 in 10 18-24 year old viewers say they wish that “dating were more common than just hooking up.” And perhaps surprising to some – that number is the same for both males and females.

In this day of ambiguous text messaging, Facebook stalking and morphing gender roles, MTV research shows that Millennials are having an increasingly difficult time navigating the path from casual hook-ups to FBO. It seems to look something like this:

As Maddy, 21 explains ““Relationships tend to either be married or hooking up. We don’t know what’s in-between.”

We see a lot of what we call “faux-stalgia” among young men & women for the dating rituals of their parents’ era… an era they never actually even experienced firsthand. One collegiate woman said, “Today, it’s not about a conversation at a party and then a date… it’s all about Facebook and texting and will he change our status to FBO. If it’s not FBO, it’s not real. Back in my parents’ day, it wasn’t like that.”

Obviously technology plays a part in muddying the waters, as it facilitates a new “permissible vagueness” in today’s relationships (late night ‘heyyyyyy’ texts, casual encounters, etc.). Plus, there’s less societal pressure to settle down in your early 20’s. A few more interesting dynamics of “love-stuckness” we’ve seen:

Initiation Conundrum

Morphing gender roles (rise of the alpha female) have led to a world where it’s unclear who should initiate in heterosexual relationships. While girls complain that guys don’t do enough, likewise, many guys are frustrated that girls don’t play a bigger role.

Consider these two stats: 76% of girls say guys don’t take enough initiative in relationships… and 64% of guys say girls should take more of a role initiating relationships. Though the first-date-rule still holds relatively sacred (both genders generally believe guys should organize and pay), guys feel that girls should play a bigger part in pre-first-date-initiation, and also the facilitation of future dates. 

A lot of young men confess to us they are “terrified” of approaching women in bars who can often be “total bitches,” and also harbor some concern they will offend women for offering to pay. Meanwhile, a majority of the young women in our panels say they crave the storybook romance they see in The Notebook and Disney movies.

But my stock is rising…

The ‘more fish in the sea’ adage has never been more true, with the plethora of online dating sites available to ‘shop’ for mates, a giant pool of Facebook ‘friends of friends,’ and many apps that facilitate meeting potentials (we’ve heard tales of people meeting on Words with Friends, and even a guy who picks up girls through Yelp reviews he writes). So not surprisingly, a lot of people just don’t want to commit. As one of our panelists who has had a great deal of success with online dating puts it: “Why should I sell if my stock is rising?”

Faux Sex and the City Mentality

Millennials have a love/hate relationship with hooking up. As the author of The End of Men explains in the NY Times “Nobody says, ‘I love the hookup culture,’ and nobody says, ‘I want it to change and go back.’ ” A lot of our panelists feel conflicted about this dynamic, and many who long for something more serious say they put on a front that they are “cool” with a casual hook-up.

So perhaps not surprisingly, we’ve seen Millennials turn to tech for answers (or at least for a good laugh.) There’s apps like Drunk Dial NO! that don’t allow you to text certain people after a certain hour, and sites like hetexted.com that help you decipher text messages. So maybe now you can finally have some closure as to what that “it was cool to hang out” text really means…