Hookup Culture Promised Freedom, Delivered Burnout

I couldn’t help but wonder — when did freedom start feeling like another thing we had to manage?

In urban India, hookup culture arrived wearing the language of progress. It sounded modern. Liberating. Finally, a way to want without answering to parents, society, marriage timelines, or that ever-present question: “Where is this going?”

For a generation raised between conservative households and liberal Instagram feeds, it felt like a loophole. Sex without commitment. Desire without declarations. Intimacy without consequences — or so we thought.

At first, it felt intoxicating.

Dating apps gave us access we’d never had before. Cities offered anonymity. Weekends became possibilities instead of obligations. You could meet someone on Friday night and be a completely different person by Sunday morning — untouched, unaccountable, free.

Freedom tasted especially sweet in a culture where everything else came with conditions.

No shaadi pressure.

No family involvement.

No “log kya kahenge”.

Just chemistry. Consent. A room with the door shut.

But slowly, subtly, exhaustion crept in.

Because in India, hookup culture didn’t replace expectations — it simply postponed them. Sex became easier to negotiate than emotions. Bodies were accessible, but intentions remained locked behind polite vagueness.

We could sleep together, but asking “what are we?” still felt taboo.

Too forward. Too needy. Too Western. Too serious.

So we learnt to hover.

We hooked up between weddings we weren’t ready for. Between careers still stabilising. Between parents who didn’t ask questions as long as nothing became “official”. Between identities we were still explaining — sometimes to the world, sometimes to ourselves.

Hookups became the safest middle ground.

Not too rebellious.

Not too committed.

But safety has a cost.

We told ourselves this was empowerment. That we were choosing ourselves. That we were unlearning old scripts. And maybe we were — but nobody warned us that unlearning without rebuilding leaves a vacuum.

The burnout didn’t come from sex.

It came from emotional repetition.

From starting over, again and again.

From having the same conversations with different people.

From intimacy that never crossed into continuity.

In queer and straight circles alike, hookups offered relief from social scrutiny — but not from loneliness. In fact, sometimes they deepened it. Because the more invisible your dating life already is, the more disposable intimacy begins to feel.

You’re desired — but discreetly.

Wanted — but temporarily.

Intimate — but only within carefully negotiated boundaries.

Nobody owes anyone anything. Everyone agrees.

And yet, everyone feels a little hollow.

There’s a particular fatigue in urban Indian dating — where you’re progressive enough to want freedom, but still culturally conditioned to crave stability. Where you reject traditional timelines, but haven’t built emotional alternatives.

We said we didn’t want attachment — but still wanted to feel chosen.

We wanted sex without expectations — but resented being replaceable.

We wanted independence — but quietly hoped someone would stay.

And when that contradiction surfaced, we blamed ourselves for not being evolved enough.

Burnout became normalised.

We joked about it.

We masked it as “being chill”.

We called it growth.

But it showed up anyway — in disinterest, emotional numbness, the inability to feel excited even when something good came along.

Because freedom without meaning eventually feels like drift.

Hookup culture promised us escape from suffocation.

What it didn’t prepare us for was emptiness.

Not everyone wants commitment. Not everyone should. This isn’t nostalgia for arranged marriages or moral policing disguised as wisdom. It’s simply an observation — that humans, even modern Indian ones, don’t thrive on access alone.

We need rhythm.

Continuity.

Some sense of being remembered.

Burnout isn’t regression.

It’s information.

It’s the body saying it wants more than moments stitched together by convenience. More than secrecy. More than being desired only in fragments.

Maybe growing up in urban India today isn’t about rejecting hookups or glorifying relationships. Maybe it’s about admitting that freedom, without emotional intention, is just another kind of exhaustion.

And maybe the most radical thing we can do — in a culture that taught us silence, compromise, and performance — is to finally ask ourselves what kind of intimacy actually sustains us.

Even if the answer is inconvenient.