Introduction

In this second installment of “Party of the Future: Voices from the Millennial Generation,” we have asked a new group of under-thirty authors to talk about relationships—everything from sex to family ties to ordinary friendship. The first set of “Party of the Future” essays was about political engagement and public service. These essays are more overtly personal, but they are still political. Time and again, the writers in this series defy the pop-sociological diagnoses of their generation so popular among their elders.

Since the 1960s began, America has used sex to mark off different periods of our history. We have had the age of the pill, the age of AIDS, and now the so-called age of the “hookup.” But what our writers show is that generalizations about living in the hookup age can be very thin unless they are measured against the details of personal experience.

Our authors find themselves part of a social landscape shaped by earlier sexual eras, but at...