transience and community

Susan McWilliams's article on hookup culture for frontporchrepublic not only punctuates the typical pieties about the phenomenon now known as "hooking up," but also, in the process, puts a perceptive finger on an aspect of the American culture that created it:

In a country where the average person moves 12 times in his or her lifetime and 43 million people (including 13 million children) move each year, it is hard to grow up without ingesting the idea that most relationships have expiration dates. In the United States, as teen movies like American Pie teach us, the culmination of compulsory education — high-school graduation — is a ritual of separation. Everyone who attends an American high school does with the expectation that it ends in the breaking apart of a community, not in integration into a community. (This probably explains why all teen television dramas fall apart when the characters graduate high school; for American audiences, it is implausible that a group of high-school friends would remain friends after commencement.) For young people who attend college, the cycle of separation repeats four years later.