When I was younger — back when Saved by the Bell reruns were still en vogue — I wanted to be Zack Morris.

All right, who am I kidding? I still want to be Zack Morris.

I mean, what guy wouldn’t?

Zack was sly enough to get himself out of the tightest jams, smart enough to score a 1502 on the SAT after years of slacking and, above all, charming enough to attract any girl at Bayside.

Zack would do with a love interest what your father did with your mother … No! Before that … He’d ask her on — gasp! — a date.

In Zack’s case, that meant taking a girl out to a movie on a Saturday night and, of course, to The Max afterwards for a burger and a shake. Sure, like any red-blooded male, Zack wanted some action at the end of the night (and usually got some, with the live studio audience giving its famous high-pitched “whoooooo” in the background). But, by and large, Zack, Slater, Screech and company went out on dates for the same reason your parents did — because they provided a low-pressure setting for two people to get to know each other, and maybe enjoy themselves in the process.

Boy, how times change.

Saved by the Bell ended its run in 1992. But I’m willing to bet that if Zack Morris went to Cornell in 2006, he’d belong to the seediest fraternity on campus, pop his collar and measure his success with the opposite sex not by the number of dates he could score, but by the number of girls he could score with. In other words, he’d be Stifler from American Pie.

Alas, college students over the past decade or so have slowly done away with the dating scene in favor of something that’s come to be known as the “hook-up culture” — an apt term, when the majority of campus sexual encounters take place between drunk partygoers who’ve known each other for all of 15 minutes.

Most of us treasure the stories of our parents’ first meeting, first date, first kiss, etc., and hope to have similar anecdotes for our children. We’re heading for a point, however, where half of the boys and girls who ask how their parents met will be told a lie, or the ugly truth: “You see, Daddy saw Mommy at a frat party, he started grinding up against her, Mommy stuck her tongue down Daddy’s throat, and I’ll tell you the rest when you’re older … ”

Most girls — and most guys, I contend — lament this state of affairs and claim that they wouldn’t mind seeing a return to the golden days of dating, when a guy had to earn a first kiss. Ask a girl on this campus, though, what would rattle her more — a guy she just met seeking to make out with her on a beer-stained dance floor or that same person asking her to dinner — and she’ll probably answer the latter even if that’s what she truly desires.

This new twisted set of norms is self-perpetuating.

College girls today are caught off-guard by a date request simply because it so unusual to them — and, therefore, suggests something unusual (read: unusually negative) about the guy — whereas anybody who has been to more than a dozen frat parties is probably by now desensitized to the sight of the half-dressed girl whoring herself off to the nearest thing with a Y-chromosome.

Guys, on the other hand, do what’s worked for them in the past, which, for many, means acting like an alpha-male jerk. I didn’t understand why until this summer, when I read Neil Strauss’s recent hit The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. The book’s premise is that if you can subtly lower a girl’s self-esteem — by looking uninterested in her, by paying more attention to her less attractive friends, by giving her mild insults and backhanded compliments — she will feel a drive to win your approval, which she will interpret as attraction.

It’s bad enough that one can gain a girl’s interest by making her feel worthless.

Unfortunately, this equation works in reverse as well. If you demonstrate to a girl that you believe she is worth getting to know — enough, say, to spend your last paycheck on dinner and a movie — you run the risk of looking desperate and losing her interest.

As a result, we have a thousand Stiflers running around this campus, each of them probably with an inner Zack Morris that was locked up once upon a time because that girl he liked freshman year stopped flirting with him the moment he suggested they do dinner, or because his lab partner found it odd that he’d want to take her on a date if they weren’t officially “dating,” or because the girl he took to dinner was offended that he felt the need to open her door because she could open her own door, thank you very much, or because the Hotelie he’s been courting says yes, a movie sounds great, and then inexplicably cancels the day before because she “just remembered that tomorrow was — End of Voice Message. To replay, press 1. To delete, press 2. To save, press 3.”

I guess what I’m trying to say is that after hearing some of these horror stories, and experiencing a fair number myself, I understand why some guys don’t want to put up with the aggravation involved in true courtship.

I sometimes wonder why I continue to put up with it. I mean, why not just surrender to these new norms, pop my collar and find the nearest frat party? Well … because I know that there is an end to this charade, one that involves finding somebody I’m content to spend a life, not just a night, with. I haven’t a clue where I’m going to meet her, but I’ll be damned if it’s going to be on a fraternity dance floor.

Ben Birnbaum is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at bhb9@cornell.edu.Infomaniacs Anonymous appears Tuesdays.