Locked in People moving in tandem across the city. Some see hand-holding as a public announcement that a couple is approaching. Others see the maneuver as an ideal way to snake through a crowd.

ON a brisk autumn afternoon, in the shadow of the marble arch in Washington Square Park, a couple visiting from Ohio walked along holding hands like two teenagers going steady, decades after “going steady” went out of vogue.

Or as the Beatles sang back in 1963: “When I’ll feel that something, I want to hold your hand.”

Those simple lyrics turned an expression of teenage longing and first romantic steps into a No. 1 hit. Yet today, when Justin Timberlake is at the top of the charts with “SexyBack” and the digital airwaves are filled with steamy lyrical declarations (“I’m into havin’ sex, I ain’t into makin’ love” sang 50 Cent in “In da Club”), couples like Dave and Carey Findlay still intertwine fingers, kiss palms and link pinkies as they meander through parks, cross streets and snake through crowds.

“Hand-holding is the one aspect that’s not been affected by the sexual revolution,” said Dalton Conley, a professor and chairman of the department of sociology at New York University. “It’s less about sex than about a public demonstration about coupledom.”

Nowadays hand-holding has attracted the interest of scientists who are studying its effects on the body and mind. And sexual health educators say it is a much-discussed topic among gay students who now publicly hold hands more than ever before but still must consider whether they want to declare their sexuality.

“I think it remains more important in an era of perhaps more liberal sexual norms,” Dr. Conley said. “It remains this thing to be doled out.”

To hold someone’s hand is to offer them affection, protection or comfort. It is a way to communicate that you are off the market. Practically speaking, it is an efficient way to squeeze through a crowd without losing your partner. People do it during vigils, marches, weddings and funerals.

Usually it connotes something innocuous and sweet about a couple and their relationship. In rare instances, it takes on added potency, such as when President George W. Bush held the hand of Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in Crawford, Tex., last year — an act of respect and affection in Arab countries — reminding some people of the film “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which depicted the Bush family’s close business ties to Saudi leaders and which ignited conspiracy theories.

But, over all, few things are more innocent than a child grabbing the hand of a parent, for protection, direction and, as Mr. Findlay put it, connection. And with many children these days closer and more outwardly affectionate to their parents, chances are you have spotted a mother and her teenage daughter and perhaps even a father and his adolescent son ambling through a mall, scurrying through a crosswalk or strolling along, hand in hand.

Adult children and their elderly parents also hold hands, for balance, support and as a sign of love.

As for romantic couples, the opinions about hand-holding are as varied as fingerprints. But most people agree that it has merely changed, not lost favor.

“I think that for sure college students hold hands just like the old days,” said Sandra L. Caron, a professor of family relations and human sexuality at the University of Maine in Orono.

If they do, it is likely only after they are deep into a relationship — not in those early days of budding romance, when a touch of hands was the first act of intimacy between a couple. That was the hand-holding that the Beatles wrote about. (Followed swiftly by the sexual revolution, whose equivalent anthem might be The Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together.”)

Among more than a half-dozen students at the University of Maine, there seemed to be two universal truths: that hand-holding is the least nauseating public display of affection and that holding hands has become more significant than other seemingly deeper expressions of love and romance.

“It is a lot more intimate to hold hands nowadays than to kiss,” said Joel Kershner, 23. Because of that, he said, reaching for someone’s hand these days has more potential for rejection than leaning in for a smooch at a party where alcohol is flowing.

Libby Tyler, 20, said it was “weird that hand-holding is more serious,” but true. “It’s something that you lead up to,” she said.

There is nothing casual about it any more, said Rachel Peters, 22. “Hand-holding is something that usually people do once they’ve confirmed they’re a couple,” she said.

But if that is not complicated enough, where you choose to hold hands also has meaning, the students said.

Drew Fitzherbert, 21, said that public hand-holding “shows that commitment not only to you and your partner but everyone else in the community.”

Dr. Conley of N.Y.U. agreed. “In the dark movie theater, in the dorm room, that’s a very different social act,” he said.

Are people holding hands as much as they once did? That’s impossible to quantify. But Gregory T. Eells, the director of counseling and psychological services at Cornell University in Ithaca, said he didn’t think so.

“I see more people on their cellphone than holding hands,” he said, adding, “To some extent we are trading real face-to-face relationships, where there’s touch and body language, for electronic ones.”

Peter Shawn Bearman, a professor of sociology and the director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University, said that hand-holding in crowded cities like New York may simply be impractical.

“Maybe if the proportion of hand-holders has indeed gone down it has more to do with density (of humans) than the devaluing of hand-holding as a romantic signal,” he wrote in an e-mail message.

Whatever degree of hand-holding may be happening, there are good reasons to cultivate the habit — reasons would-be hand-graspers may wish to pass along to their hands-in-pockets partners.

“Based on what we’ve seen, when we get more physical intimacy we get better relationships, whether a mother and an infant or a couple,” said Tiffany Field, the director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami School of Medicine.

Even monkeys understand the importance of a hand squeeze every now and then. In “Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals,” Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, wrote that some monkeys hold hands in reconciliation after a fight.

James Coan, an assistant professor of psychology and the neuroscience graduate program at the University of Virginia, has studied the impact of human touch, particularly how it affects the neural response to threatening situations, and said the results of a recent study were more dramatic than he expected.

“We found that holding the hand of really anyone, it made your brain work a little less hard in coping,” Dr. Coan said, adding that any sort of hand-holding relaxes the body.

The study, which will be published this year in the journal Psychological Science, involved 16 couples who were rated happily married based on the answers in a detailed questionnaire. The wives were put inside an M.R.I. machine and were told they were to receive mild electric shocks to an ankle. Brain images showed that regions of the women’s brains that had been activated in anticipation of pain and that were associated with negative emotions decreased when their husbands reached into the machine.

“With spouse hand-holding you also stop looking for other signs of danger and you start feeling more secure,” said Dr. Coan, who led the study. “If you’re in a really strong relationship, you may be protected against pain and stress hormones that may have a damaging effect on your immune system.”

Perhaps it is why so many people crave it.

Blogs and online forums are rife with complaints of those who say their significant other does not want to hold hands. “When we go out, we always have a blast, but the one thing that bothers me is that he never holds my hand in public,” writes a woman on a “love advice” forum on www.lovingyou.com.

For older couples, letting go of hand-holding may be one more sign that they are pressed for time and too swamped for little acts of intimacy.

“When do we make time to hold hands?,” said Dr. Eells of Cornell, talking about his own marriage of 15 years. “Not very often.”

The couple is often busy shuttling children to and from school and extracurricular activities, not strolling through parks like characters in a Georges Seurat painting.

Sometimes, though, even errands provide opportunities. Recently, Dr. Eells said, he and his 9-year-old daughter were caught in a downpour after her cheerleading practice. The two grabbed hands and raced off into the rain together. When they finally splashed over to the car, the damp girl turned her face to her father. “That was awesome,” she sighed.

LYNCHBURG, Va. — When the board at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College announced its decision this month to admit men, the college’s interim president, Ginger Worden, looked at a distraught student protester nearby, tears rolling down the young woman’s face.

Josh Meltzer for The New York Times

Ginger Worden, interim president, says the market no longer supports single-sex education.

“I’m sorry,” Ms. Worden, an alumna of Randolph-Macon, said she mouthed silently to the student, as tears came to her own eyes.

A moment later, the president and the protester hugged, in quiet commiseration over the demise of single-sex education at a college once known as “the Vassar of the South,” when Vassar enrolled only women.

Decades after Ivy League institutions like Yale and Princeton opened to women, the number of women’s colleges has shrunk from about 300 in the 1960’s to fewer than 60 today. The top institutions that do not admit men — Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Mount Holyoke and Smith — say they are doing fine. But behind them are small liberal arts colleges for women, like Randolph-Macon, increasingly struggling against financial pressures to win applicants in an era of unbounded choice. And in recent months, their numbers have been dwindling precipitously.

Just before Randolph-Macon’s vote, Regis College outside Boston announced that it would begin admitting men next September. At Rutgers University, the women’s undergraduate college, Douglass, will cease to exist as a separate degree-granting institution at the end of this academic year. This spring, Tulane University merged its H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College with the undergraduate college for men.

Wells College, on Cayuga Lake in upstate New York, was established in 1868 and began admitting men last year. And at Marymount College for women in Tarrytown, N.Y., which merged with Fordham University in 2002, next spring’s graduation will be the last, after 100 years.

For these institutions, the decision to admit men is not without risk. Many of the women enrolled are passionate about single-sex education and have bitterly opposed the changes with petitions, protests and lawsuits. Alumnae, who may be even more passionate, have threatened to withhold donations.

But college trustees and administrators say they have little choice. Only 3.4 percent of girls graduating from high school last year who took the SAT said they would apply to women’s colleges, according to the College Board, down from 5 percent 10 years ago.

That statistic is cited over and over by presidents of women’s colleges in interviews about their future. “The market is telling us young women don’t want to come to single-sex colleges,” Ms. Worden said.

She said Randolph-Macon, founded over a century ago, had paid a hefty price for staying single sex. To attract and retain students, she said, the college awards 99 percent of them financial aid, and the typical discount is 62 percent, much of it merit based. That means that despite tuition and fees of more than $30,000, the typical student pays $13,000, Ms. Worden said. These subsidies have been a persistent drain on the $140 million endowment.

Nationally, most women who attend single-sex colleges say they chose their institutions despite the absence of men, not because of it. At Randolph-Macon, 4 in 10 students transfer to other, usually coeducational, colleges or universities.

But among the 6 in 10 who remain, many are fiercely dedicated to attending college without men. “Every single student on this campus has a leadership position in something,” said Anne Haley, a senior who is leading the protesters here. The week after the board’s decision, about 300 students stayed away from classes, and 200 put in requests to transfer to other institutions, a severe blow for a student body of 712, if they follow through.

David W. Strauss, a partner at the Art & Science Group, a marketing firm in Baltimore that has advised all-female colleges, including Randolph-Macon, said his firm’s research suggested that most women, even those attending single-sex colleges, would prefer a coeducational institution. “If you look at this over time,” Mr. Strauss said, “the proportion of college-bound women who say they would consider a women’s-only college has been on a long and steep decline.”

Susan E. Lennon, director of the nonprofit Women’s College Coalition, said the opening of once all-male bastions in the Ivy League and elsewhere and Title IX legislation that ramped up women’s sports programs have made it tougher for women’s colleges to survive. Yet national surveys show that women who attend these institutions are more engaged and successful academically than those in mixed environments, Ms. Lennon said.

Mr. Strauss said women’s colleges often wanted to use this sort of research to present themselves as places where women could thrive without having to compete with men. But that marketing may not work, he said, because potential applicants do not see themselves as needing protection from competition with men.

“Their sense is that the women’s college has something of the broken wing, of women who need a cloistered environment,” he said. “High-performing young women tend to see themselves as high-performing students, and not as students in need of some kind of special care.”

In the uproar over Randolph-Macon’s decision, Sweet Briar College and Hollins University, sister institutions to Randolph-Macon for more than a century, publicly rededicated themselves to remaining single sex.

Elisabeth Showalter Muhlenfeld, president of Sweet Briar, said that since 2004 the college had focused on raising enrollment by emphasizing hands-on experience and opportunities to study abroad. So far, enrollment has grown to just over 600 students, from 557, and Dr. Muhlenfeld said she is hopeful that it can top 700.

Trinity (Washington) University, once a women’s college for upper-crust Roman Catholics, has embraced a new mission of educating low-income women in the Washington region. Virtually all are on financial aid, and the institution manages by attracting large corporate donors.

But at Randolph-Macon, administrators saw no other options.

Ms. Worden, a former chairwoman of the board who stepped in as interim president while Randolph-Macon weighed going coeducational, said she had some regret about the move but was excited about the prospects for growth. But she said the advantage of an all-women’s campus was apparent even in the current protests. Though the two sides are at loggerheads, there is no undercurrent of enmity or animosity.

Before the board’s vote, some protesters gave her a hug, along with a school mascot puppet, a toy bomb and a bottle of calamine lotion, “in case things got too irritating,” she said. The protesters presented an alternative plan that would have preserved the women’s-only campus to the board the night before its vote.

In all this, Ms. Worden sees women finding their own path toward negotiating and protesting — purposeful, balanced and constructive.

Undoubtedly, there is a place for women’s colleges. What is missing, she said, is the market for it.

CHICAGO — So here’s the thing about speed dating for Muslims.

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James Estrin/The New York Times

Once the banquet got under way, the mothers were plenty busy themselves.

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James Estrin/The New York Times

Men and women lined up to register.

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James Estrin/The New York Times

At a “matrimonial banquet,” single Muslim American men spent seven minutes at each table, including the one at which Alia Abbas sat before moving on.

Many American Muslims — or at least those bent on maintaining certain conservative traditions — equate anything labeled “dating” with hellfire, no matter how short a time is involved. Hence the wildly popular speed dating sessions at the largest annual Muslim conference in North America were given an entirely more respectable label. They were called the “matrimonial banquet.”

“If we called it speed dating, it will end up with real dating,” said Shamshad Hussain, one of the organizers, grimacing.

Both the banquet earlier this month and various related seminars underscored the difficulty that some American Muslim families face in grappling with an issue on which many prefer not to assimilate. One seminar, called “Dating,” promised attendees helpful hints for “Muslim families struggling to save their children from it.”

The couple of hundred people attending the dating seminar burst out laughing when Imam Muhamed Magid of the Adams Center, a collective of seven mosques in Virginia, summed up the basic instructions that Muslim American parents give their adolescent children, particularly males: “Don’t talk to the Muslim girls, ever, but you are going to marry them. As for the non-Muslim girls, talk to them, but don’t ever bring one home.”

“These kids grew up in America, where the social norm is that it is O.K. to date, that it is O.K. to have sex before marriage,” Imam Magid said in an interview. “So the kids are caught between the ideal of their parents and the openness of the culture on this issue.”

The questions raised at the seminar reflected just how pained many American Muslims are by the subject. One middle-aged man wondered if there was anything he could do now that his 32-year-old son had declared his intention of marrying a (shudder) Roman Catholic. A young man asked what might be considered going too far when courting a Muslim woman.

Panelists warned that even seemingly innocuous e-mail exchanges or online dating could topple one off the Islamic path if one lacked vigilance. “All of these are traps of the Devil to pull us in and we have no idea we are even going that way,” said Ameena Jandali, the moderator of the dating seminar.

Hence the need to come up with acceptable alternatives in North America, particularly for families from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, where there is a long tradition of arranged marriages.

One panelist, Yasmeen Qadri, suggested that Muslim mothers across the continent band together in an organization called “Mothers Against Dating,” modeled on Mothers Against Drunk Driving. If the term “arranged marriage” is too distasteful to the next generation, she said, then perhaps the practice could be Americanized simply by renaming it “assisted marriage,” just like assisted living for the elderly.

“In the United States we can play with words however we want, but we are not trying to set aside our cultural values,” said Mrs. Qadri, a professor of education.

Basically, for conservative Muslims, dating is a euphemism for premarital sex. Anyone who partakes risks being considered morally louche, with their marriage prospects dimming accordingly, particularly young women.

Mrs. Qadri and other panelists see a kind of hybrid version emerging in the United States, where the young do choose their own mates, but the parents are at least partly involved in the process in something like half the cases.

Having the families involved can help reduce the divorce rate, Imam Majid said, citing a recent informal study that indicated that one third of Muslim marriages in the United States end in divorce. It was still far too high, he noted, but lower than the overall American average. Intermarriages outside Islam occur, but remain relatively rare, he said.

Scores of parents showed up at the marriage banquet to chaperone their children. Many had gone through arranged marriages — meeting the bride or groom chosen by their parents sometimes as late as their wedding day and hoping for the best. They recognize that the tradition is untenable in the United States, but still want to influence the process.

The banquet is considered one preferable alternative to going online, although that too is becoming more common. The event was unquestionably one of the big draws at the Islamic Society of North America’s annual convention, which attracted thousands of Muslims to Chicago over Labor Day weekend, with many participants bemoaning the relatively small pool of eligible candidates even in large cities.

There were two banquets, with a maximum 150 men and 150 women participating each day for $55 apiece. They sat 10 per table and the men rotated every seven minutes.

At the end there was an hourlong social hour that allowed participants time to collect e-mail addresses and telephone numbers over a pasta dinner with sodas. (Given the Muslim ban on alcohol, no one could soothe jumpy nerves with a drink.) Organizers said many of the women still asked men to approach their families first. Some families accept that the couple can then meet in public, some do not.

A few years ago the organizers were forced to establish a limit of one parent per participant and bar them from the tables until the social hour because so many interfered. Parents are now corralled along one edge of the reception hall, where they alternate between craning their necks to see who their adult children are meeting or horse-trading bios, photographs and telephone numbers among themselves.

Talking to the mothers — and participants with a parent usually take a mother — is like surveying members of the varsity suddenly confined to the bleachers.

“To know someone for seven minutes is not enough,” scoffed Awila Siddique, 46, convinced she was making better contacts via the other mothers.

Mrs. Siddique said her shy, 20-year-old daughter spent the hours leading up to the banquet crying that her father was forcing her to do something weird. “Back home in Pakistan, the families meet first,’’ she said. “You are not marrying the guy only, but his whole family.”

Samia Abbas, 59 and originally from Alexandria, Egypt, bustled out to the tables as soon as social hour was called to see whom her daughter Alia, 29, had met.

“I’m her mother so of course I’m looking for her husband,” said Mrs. Abbas, ticking off the qualities she was looking for, including a good heart, handsome, as highly educated as her daughter and a good Muslim.

Did he have to be Egyptian?

“She’s desperate for anyone!” laughed Alia, a vivacious technology manager for a New York firm, noting that the “Made in Egypt” stipulation had long since been cast overboard.

“Her cousin who is younger has babies now!” exclaimed the mother, dialing relatives on her cellphone to handicap potential candidates.

For doubters, organizers produced a success story, a strikingly good-looking pair of Chicago doctors who met at the banquet two years ago. Organizers boast of at least 25 marriages over the past six years.

Fatima Alim, 50, was disappointed when her son Suehaib, a 26-year-old pharmacist, did not meet anyone special on the first day. They had flown up from Houston especially for the event, and she figured chances were 50-50 that he would find a bride.

When she arrived in Texas as a 23-year-old in an arranged marriage, Mrs. Alim envied the girls around her, enthralled by their discussions about all the fun they were having with their boyfriends, she said, even if she was eventually shocked to learn how quickly they moved from one to the next and how easily they divorced. Still, she was determined that her children would chose their own spouses.

“We want a good, moderate Muslim girl, not a very, very modern girl,” she said. “The family values are the one thing I like better back home. Divorces are high here because of the corruption, the intermingling with other men and other women.”

For his part, Mr. Alim was resisting the strong suggestion from his parents that they switch tactics and start looking for a nice girl back in Pakistan. Many of the participants reject that approach, describing themselves as too Americanized — plus the visas required are far harder to obtain in the post-Sept. 11 world.

Mr. Alim said he still believed what he had been taught as a child, that sex outside marriage was among the gravest sins, but he wants to marry a fellow American Muslim no matter how hard she is to find.

“I think I can hold out a couple more years,” he said in his soft Texas drawl with a boyish smile. “The sooner the better, but I think I can wait. By 30, hopefully, even if that is kind of late.”