Boston, May 23 (Agencies) : Say you’re at university and you fancy someone, do you immediately friend them on Facebook, trawl through their holiday pics, like all their statuses? Or maybe you check the location of their tweets, hoping to ‘accidentally’ bump into them in the street?
If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these, you could benefit from a little dating education. Kerry Cronin, a lecturer at Boston College, was so disappointed by the internet’s destructive effect on her students’ social skills that she now gives extra credit to the ones who go on dates with each other.
Cronin says that dating has been ‘supplanted’ on campuses by a hook-up culture, because it ‘requires the courage to be vulnerable to another person.’
The ‘Cronin dates’ are not allowed to involve kissing, sex or even alcohol, yet students are somehow still keen to participate.