I really am sorry it's over. Hooking Up seemed to pop up unannounced on ABC just a few fleeting weeks ago and it has already vanished — like a musty summer rain shower in Oahu. (It rolled in and whooshed out almost before I could get wet.) I could've watched that thing every week until the cows came home. I eat it up. For me, it's like watching looping snapshots of the episodic romantic ordeals of my life. Each vignette is like grabbing onto an exposed nerve ending in my being and yanking it... every phrase, every glance and every hope and betrayal and anguish and yearning and fearful flutter of the eyebrow, I've heard and seen and felt sometime, somewhere before. Deeply. All the noisy clutter are all old friends. The relationship saga — or pit — is unending but unchanging. Hooking Up feels all too close, happily.

By David W. Taylor (Email Me)
Reality Reel Media
08.14.05

Part of the fun in sharing the personal dating riddles documented in Hooking Up is, now, sitting on the sidelines and kicking back and watching the unfathomable incongruities of the heart wind their hilarious paths through the lives of people looking for meaningful, lasting human contact within a city teeming with human contact. It's not that most of us haven't spun the same odious webs; it just may be stunning that the practice is so ingrained and rampant. The partial allure is the silly, self-conscious laugh we gently release and place upon ourselves and the human condition.

In previous episodes, we had Amy, who madly wanted marriage and children but gave much too much of herself — and way too much time — to a younger cad, David, who was clearly a casual kooky city dude who looked upon marriage and children as redolent of some ancient medieval blood-letting rite; but whose hobby was — take a guess! — non-stop "shagging." Amy hung on for sheer excitement (or out of sheer misplaced logic; i.e., sex equals commitment), but naturally complained about his pancaking sexual trysts and mounting casual indifference to her more matrimonial warp. She wanted kids and the suburbs but decided spreading her legs for devilish Dave was somehow relevant and productive (in reaching her goals?). Ha! Yet when the noticeably perfect husband candidate, Matthew, walked into her life, Amy thought something was "a little off." Which merely meant that he was missing that revolting horn-dog charm. It's that, fair to say, insanity that grips the foundations of our wonderment. How do we do the things that we do?

In the side-splitting, sad, wonderful Hooking Up finale, our latest clueless femme fatale would have to be Christen, 25, a sales agent. She's a frumpy ("I know I'm no supermodel") brunette who already looks 30 — though not vastly unattractive — who has posted on her internet dating profile a bizarre picture of herself in a bikini. She has posed like a Romanian gymnast: heavily leaning her upper torso over so her dangling breasts become the focal point of the mirage, though she looks like she's about to upchuck into a toilet.