Everyone at Harvard says that “no one dates in college,” and during my first year I certainly started feeling that way too. A few days ago I made a neatly-organized little outline of some reasons people don’t date when in college — then I had one late-night conversation about my theories and everything fell to pieces.
So I decided to spill out everything I thought about dating in college last night in a stream-of-consciousness essay. And I decided to publish it totally raw — besides a few spelling and grammar fixes that had eluded me, what’s below are exactly the words that were going through my mind at 3am last night. It’s raw, it’s disorganized, it’s brutally honest, it’s a little incoherent, it’s me.
What’s up with dating in college, especially Harvard? That’s what I’m gonna try to figure out. I thought I had it all figured out then I had one conversation about it and everything got turned inside out. That’s how it always is. Every conversation I ever have about relationships or love or whatever always ends up that way.
Seems like dating and hookups are on different ends of a spectrum. And people in college sway more strongly toward the hookup side for a number of reasons.
أولا: dating requires commitment and time investment which, at first glance, people just don’t have time for in college. But I push back against that because people always have time to do more challenging classes or take on clubs and indeed people get busier, كنت أتصور, as college goes on. So it’s not so much an issue that they don’t have room for relationships so much as they don’t want to make room for it. It’s yet another commitment — this one optional and, seemingly, conferring no benefits — so they take the easy way out and don’t bother. Versus with hookups there’s no pre-planning or time or emotional investment. You hook up then go about your day. It’s quick, clean, simple, and effective, something that’s all too addictive in this world of big tough unrewarding things. Zero commitment benefits are always popular.
Although if someone really cared they’d make room for it. Saying you’re too busy is an easy way to avoid discussing the real reason you don’t want relationships. Or it just shows how little you prioritize them. Kinda circular reasoning here. Why? Perhaps there’s other reasons.
I think a big thing is FOMO (fear of missing out). People don’t wanna be bound to one person, I theorize, because then someone else they might want to date might get taken. Dating is exclusive, بعد كل شيء. There’s also the fear that they’re missing out on “single person life” experiences like parties or just freedom maybe. Also people are afraid if they botch the relationship with the person this time they’ll never get another chance at them. So they keep biding their time forever. في غضون, with hookups, there’s less FOMO because you can always hook up with someone again and you can easily flit from one hookup to another. Although there is still an element of FOMO because if you aren’t constantly hooking up or finding good hookup partners you feel like you’re missing out on something beneficial.
Also people have really high expectations for who they date: not just qualities but also actions. Like they have to check off a bunch of boxes — which makes them a unicorn to begin with — but they also have to be versatile enough to provide steady companionship and physical stuff (things that don’t overlap much), plus companionship, emotional support, reminders of affection, shared interests, spending tons of time on them, الخ. And no reasonable person can provide all that while still being their own person. That’s the kicker! People want significant others who do this huge laundry list of things for them but — hold on — they still have to be independent and not spend too much time on you. They have to want you but not too much, that’s weird. They gotta lavish attention on you, but not too much, that’s clingy. They gotta be desirous but not too much, that’s jealous. Unrealistic expectations. So it’s no surprise people look forever for “Mr./Ms. Right” or just tell themselves they haven’t met the right person yet but, don’t worry, they’ll definitely meet that person in a few years’ time. But perhaps the fact that you haven’t met that person yet doesn’t reflect so much on the dearth of people available (this is college, بعد كل شيء, there are hundreds and thousands of potential partners who are really similar to you) as much as on your overly-high expectations. في غضون, with hookups, you just make a split-second judgment if they’re attractive or not and boom that’s it. It’s easier, faster, less intense, و (crucially) less impactful to decide who to hook up with. Like because it’s such a short-term relationship, if it’s not ideal you can just try something else next time. Very little is riding on it. Hookups can be meh but relationships have to be perfect. Whoever heard someone say “eh, he’s good enough, I’ll date him”?
There’s certainly some social pressures too to dating. Like everyone knows who you’re dating and that reflects on your personality. Is your girlfriend considered basic? Oh, now everyone thinks you’re stupid. Plus if your communities don’t approve of who you’re dating you’ll never hear the end of it. Meanwhile not dating is such an easily solution — no one will ever say anything to you except the occasional person jokingly telling you to find a girl. This is, أعتقد, a common theme: it’s very easy to not date because dating puts you out on a limb and makes you vulnerable and people, especially at a place like Harvard, are risk-averse. Meanwhile no one ever talks about hookups, to the point where it’s taboo. No one cares who you hook up with, heck even you don’t care sometimes. Being single and hooking up helps you escape a lot of the problems outlined here while conferring a lot of benefits.
What are the benefits of hooking up anyway? Obviously there’s the instant physical gratification and that’s obviously addictive. But I think more broadly it provides a feeling of being loved and desired — perhaps an even more powerful draw because, as I like to say, Sex Is All Mental™ — which in a relationship can’t always be found and takes lots of work to maintain. Like the actual sexual acts are less memorable than how you felt and how you got there — you must’ve done something right. Hookups tell you you succeeded — someone else finds you desirable and sweet talks you and treats you well and makes you feel wonderful for a little bit. It’s a drug. And who doesn’t like quick hits?
But now I’m told that people actually wanna date. And this is backed up from what I’ve been hearing from a lot of my friends. جيد, some of my friends say they want to date but just have no luck, while many more just don’t even mention dating — they say it never even registers on their radar — or they say they’re “vehemently anti-dating.” You know what’s funny? The latter group — those who say they don’t wanna date for whatever reason — somehow start dating and change their tone entirely, saying they always wanted to date and this fantastic person just changed their mind. I think people’s mindsets aren’t easily influenced and really they were lying to themselves and to everyone else all along. Like they were interested in dating (if the opportunity presented itself) but it’s more convenient to say you’re just not interested than to say you’re trying and failing. Because no one ever wants to say they’re failing at whatever they’re doing, especially at a place like Harvard with its success-addicted mindset. No one wants to appear vulnerable and prone to mistakes, even to themselves. We want to believe we’re the greatest people on the planet and we’re invincible, or at least we buy into the mindset that we can succeed at whatever we apply ourselves and that with even a little effort anything is possible. That’s the mindset that got us into Harvard in the first place, أنت تعلم. But when you put in effort and nothing works out you don’t want to admit defeat so you just say you were never interested in trying in the first place. It’s the easy way out.
And that points to a big theme I hinted at earlier. I think it’s a big theme, على الأقل. I’m stream-of-consciousness’ing this after all. It’s that dating — or expressing interest in dating — makes you vulnerable and no one wants to express vulnerability. If you like someone but they don’t like you back, well, you look weak or clingy or undesirable. But if you pretended (even to yourself) you never liked them, well, no big deal. You weren’t expecting anything anyway. Oh, and with hookups, the same sort of thing happens but a) people are less picky about who they hook up with than with who they date so you’re not as vulnerable when you say you wanna hook up with someone, and you’re more interested in hooking up with someone than with any one person in particular, كنت أتصور, and b) the stakes are much lower with hookups cause no one is gonna remember if you wanted to hook up with someone but didn’t succeed, even you won’t remember.
I think this plays out in relationships too. The person who cares less wins. The callous person never gets hurt. If you never try, you never fail. And we’re a risk-averse people. Relationships are something it’s very easy to fail at. Partially because as I mentioned earlier people have such a high bar that it’s hard to win someone’s interest in the first place. You never wanna admit you like someone, but then you want everyone to admit they like you. You say that, “oh man I wish this person would tell me that they liked me, then I’d immediately start dating them”, but you don’t realize that you would never do the same thing yourself. God forbid you talk to someone about relationships, let alone about the potential of a relationship between you and them. People have to rely on guesses and hearsay to determine if a relationship could work — and those are already not very reliable indicators of a potential relationship.
Funny how there’s a big gap between what people want others to do and what they do themselves. Broadly there’s a communication gap. People say they don’t wanna date but actually they do. And when everyone around you is telling you that they don’t wanna date, then you’re even less likely to consider dating them. It’s a vicious cycle. Which leads to comically weird results: everyone wants to date and are totally open to dating people but no one ends up dating anyone. And if you’re that one person who’s honest with themselves and puts themselves out there saying “I want to date” or “I’m interested in you” then you’re the one vulnerable one and you feel like you’re a failure. No one’s clear about their intentions with each other.
And I think no one’s clear about their intentions with themselves. I think people say they’re interested in dating in the abstract — “oh yeah, of course I’d love to get to know someone and feel special and form a deep emotional bond” and whatever — but whenever push comes to shove no one’s actually willing to date. I mean it’s reasonable to have reasons to not be willing to date but people fool themselves a lot into thinking they actually are interested. It cuts both ways, actually. A lot of people say they aren’t interested in dating when they actually are. And a lot of people say they are interested in dating when actually they aren’t really up for that. Why isn’t anyone honest with themselves?
Not sure where that rant is leading besides higher and higher levels of abstract philosophy but basically there’s a communication breakdown not only among the community but in the interior dialogue in a person. And if you’re internally conflicted then all the seemingly-cogent arguments you make to the world aren’t gonna make sense to anyone. Like, you can’t present a convincing case to the world unless you’ve convinced yourself first. So maybe the internal conflicts are the reason for the societal conflicts.
I think a lot of it is mindset. If you tell yourself you don’t want to date then you probably will try to avoid it. If you think everyone isn’t right for you then you won’t find anyone who’s right for you. A lot of the problems with relationships I outlined way at the beginning are attributable to mindset. You’re only too busy for a relationship if you put it at the bottom of your priority list. هذا هو, you tell yourself you can’t do a relationship if you don’t want it in the first place. Pretty circular reasoning. But enough to convince many people. You only get FOMO about a relationship if you’re not convinced that the relationship is the right thing to do. If you really want to be with someone you won’t think about the other options. To draw a comparison to college majors: people aren’t as neurotic about always keeping their major options open because they find something they like and narrow it down to that and have no problem eliminating the other options. That requires them to genuinely like what they’re doing. But with relationships if you tell yourself you aren’t invested in a relationship you’re not going to end up being invested in it. Again, circular reasoning.
Anyway, more broadly, your view on relationships can be self-defeating. If you tell yourself you’re never going to succeed at relationships and that no one in this place is right for you, well, those things will probably come true. It’s not always the case that if you tell yourself you’re going to succeed and you’ll find someone here that you will succeed (I wish), but it certainly doesn’t hurt.
Meanwhile with hookups, people choreograph their intentions pretty well. It seems ridiculous to coyly hide your interest in hooking up with someone. Everyone would tell you that if you want to hook up with someone, you better showcase that because there’s no other way they’ll be able to figure it out. And because people are so transparent with their desires, these hookups can happen pretty often, quickly and frictionlessly. The mindset is generally that if you want to hook up you can find a way to. Either you want to hook up and you tell yourself you do, or you don’t want to and you tell yourself you don’t want to. it’s so much cleaner.
This leads to an aside: what’s the point of a relationship? I think the jury’s out on whether it’s a net positive or negative experience — some people have overwhelmingly positive experiences, some have very negative ones, most have wildly mixed bags. But I think it’s a wonderful way to discover something about human nature and explore another psyche close-up (perhaps even too close for comfort) and learn a good bit about your strengths and weaknesses and how you approach things. Relationships bring you a breadth of experience you’d never really experience anywhere else. هذا هو, the emotions you feel in a relationship can’t really be felt in any other domain. Which is why I think it’s a crucial part of a college education. College is meant to prepare you for life as a smart thinker with an understanding of how people work, so relationships fit right in there. Plus, college is a place where you can experiment freely with relationships, there are tons of opportunities for relationships (well, in theory, I’ve already seen that people lock themselves out of opportunities), and there’s almost no risk. If a relationship fails, oh well — it’s like everything else in college. Everyone is experimenting with so many things. If your relationship falls apart it’s not like your family life or your living situation or your livelihood are at risk, as they might be if your relationship in the real world fails. You’re in an incredibly sheltered place that provides for so much exploration at college that, if you’re gonna have an exploratory relationship, nowhere’s better than here. You’re forced into close proximity with people day-in, day-out anyway so ideally the situations for forming a relationship would occur fairly often, even if they don’t in practice. Again, this is all in theory. Oh, also, relationships in college aren’t supposed to be / don’t have to be long-term. They’re educational, بعد كل شيء, which means there are gonna be a lot of false starts and stops and mistakes and problems. So college relationships probably aren’t going to last long. You only really get good at relationships by practicing and, for the most part, failing. و, طبعا, people hate failing at things, especially when they can’t fix things just by trying a little harder, so many people don’t even get to this stage of trying a relationship. People might always be waiting for something, but what are they waiting for? You have to jump in and get ready to mess up at some point.
Also, then what’s the point of hookups? In a sentence it’s all the benefits of relationships without the costs. Maybe that’s a bit simplistic way to put it. I already knew that. What else can I figure out? Perhaps hookups are more extreme versions of relationships — even shorter term, even lower-risk, even more compacted than relationships. The whole thing, from start to finish, takes at most a few hours instead of weeks or months or even years. Hookups lets you explore your interests — who you’re attracted to, what you look for in someone — very easily. Although this really only operates in the physical sphere so it’s not very easily applicable to relationships in general. It could be that sexuality is one of the more difficult parts of relationships to understand and reason about, and hookups provide a way to explore that in isolation so it isn’t tangled with relationship issues. Or maybe hookups are a natural reaction to the inability of people to communicate dating desires properly. If people aren’t going to be clear about their desires for dating — which is a huge, complex issue — maybe they’ll be clear about their desires for physical interaction, which is a smaller, separable issue. That’s kinda the same thing I said earlier, isn’t it? To return to an earlier point, if we assume that hookups represent romantic interactions on a very compressed scale, then hookups provide a way for people — who are paralyzed by an inability to form romantic relationships for personal and societal reasons — to explore romance and the people they might be interested in. Like hookups are the reasonable alternative to relationships, which in college are very difficult to form. Almost a fallback.
So do some people hook up because they can’t find relationships? I’d argue that some people just prefer hookup culture to relationship culture and would take the former even if they had the latter. But what about on the personal level? Let’s say you like someone. But as we saw you probably don’t want to verbalize or otherwise express that because then you’d look vulnerable. Instead, you settle for trying to hook up with the person because you know the potential for rejection is far lower and the bar you have to pass is far lower. And you might feel that a hookup could be a reasonable first step to a relationship. I’m not sure about that, but this train of thought makes sense. Or on a more general sense, if you want the benefits of a relationship — feeling desired and loved, forming a close bond with someone even if for just a bit — but relationships are impossible for the litany of reasons I’ve already mentioned, then engaging in hookups is your only real alternative. The crux of it all is that you’re less vulnerable and prone to rejection with hookups. Or at least it feels less bad when you do fail. So are hookups a fallback when relationships don’t work? In a manner of speaking, yes. More like they’re the only real alternative when everyone says they don’t want to date and you have the mindset that you don’t want a relationship.
An aside: let’s look at attraction in hookups and relationships. From what little I know about psychology I think that people look for different things in short-term partners (hookup partners) and long-term partners (significant others.) Again, hookups and relationships are just two ends on a spectrum. I think that’s consistent with what I’ve been saying. Anyway, people look for more sex-related stuff in short-term partners because that’s what matters in a short-term relationship, and in a long-term relationship they look for, well, all the other criteria people use to judge potential significant others. Guys like the so-called “basic” girls because they’re easy to obtain, for short-term relationships at least. Like guys won’t try to hook up with the mature, serious, stable, ambitious, etc etc whatever girl but rather with the girl they perceive to be simple-minded. But when it turns to relationships it’s the exact opposite. Guys will always try to steer clear of basic girls when it comes to relationships. (“She’s hot!” “Yeah but she’s basic, avoid her.”) Perhaps because being basic and easily obtained becomes a negative thing in the context of long-term relationships. Because if you have a girl you certainly don’t want her slipping away from you for the next guy. I don’t know how girls think as much but I’d imagine it’s somewhat similar. Basically the set of people you’d want to hook up with doesn’t necessarily overlap much with the set of people you’d want to date. I guess that muddies the argument that hookups are the only reasonable alternative to relationships. They aren’t drop-in solutions (you wouldn’t just take everyone you wanted to date and hook up with them instead, though that’s doable) but rather mindset shifts. هذا هو, instead of focusing on qualities that make for good relationships people focus on qualities that make for good hookups. It’s more about the shift in mindset than the shift in what they do with specific people. That fits with the broader theme that it’s all about the mindset you bring to relationships, long and short term, and not what you actually do in them. So basically subscribing to hookup culture requires a mindset shift. And I think the reason a lot of people are uncomfortable with hookups is that they don’t like this mindset of only looking at people through the lens of good short-term partners. Among other reasons.
Oh, and another thing: gender roles. I don’t really think like this but the prevailing thought is that guys want to date down but girls want to date up. هذا هو, in most relationships I’ve noticed, the guy is usually older, more accomplished, in a higher social position (better school, better position in an organization, إلخ), and more confident (I hesitate to say “successful”) than the girl. Like an older guy dating a younger girl is way more common in my experience than an older girl dating a younger guy. More poignantly, it’s very common to see a Harvard guy dating a girl from a less prestigious school (not to be arrogant but Harvard is considered by many the top school) but you wouldn’t really see a guy from a less prestigious school dating a girl from Harvard. It makes sense if you buy into the American stereotypes which are unfortunately pretty true: every girl wants the rich successful charismatic Harvard guy but few guys want the rich successful charismatic Harvard girl. So this means that the Harvard guys are most desirable while Harvard girls are least desirable. In general, على الأقل, the Harvard girls wouldn’t want to date the Harvard guys and the Harvard guys would want to date the Harvard girls even less (I could see girls but not guys going for equals.) The traditional gender roles that the guy should be more successful and make more money don’t appear to have gone anywhere. This is a rather vicious situation. A guy can’t try to date up because the girl wouldn’t want to date down and vice versa — so everyone’s stuck in this “guy > girl” mentality. Anyway, what this means for dating is that the genders are even less predisposed to want to date each other.
So that’s that. For now at least. I could probably keep going if I had another line of thought to go off of. It’s hard to say what concrete conclusions — pithy takeaways — I can get from this but, broadly, you can’t talk about relationships without talking about hookups and vice versa because they’re so closely intertwined, dating is hard for a variety of reasons but mostly because of people’s mindsets that confuse themselves and ultimately lead to everyone in college sending the wrong messages to each other, people are risk-averse and afraid of being vulnerable (and vulnerable is exactly what dating makes you), و, most broadly, dating in college is really, really hard while hooking up is pretty easy. I’m not sure if any of this makes sense upon being reread but it made sense to me when I was writing it.
