// essays //
Fall 2006
The Mating Game
Josh Hirschland
From the moment we step foot on campus, we hear it again and again. "Dating at Columbia doesn't exist," one friend told me bluntly. Another clarified, "People at Columbia just don't date." It's a concept that, as a guy raised on mid-afternoon prime-time television reruns depicting cute dates with cute girls, I have struggled with ever since I got here. As I understood it in high school, college was, if not the time to find your soul mate, at least the time to figure out the traits you want The One to have. Now I struggle—frustrated—trying to learn what I want out of a relationship at a school that seems uninterested in the educational curriculum of dating.
In conducting interviews for this piece, I was struck by the number of students who said they would never ask somebody out. Men and women, gay, straight, and otherwise, regardless of race, religion, or major, it is an exceptionally common thread on a diverse campus. I wince when I think of the single-minded focus on hookups, which comes with a familiar pattern that my interviews more-or-less confirmed: freshmen hope for a good lay, sophomores tire of looking, juniors make another attempt to make something of their time here, while seniors wonder whether or not they have.
The thing that galls me is that students, at least the ones I've encountered, actually want a dating scene on campus. So why doesn't one exist?
Putting aside this big question for a moment, it's interesting to note that despite the fact that there is so little dating, the word "date" itself is prevalent. People use phrases such as "Butler date," "club date," and "group date" to describe the scene at Columbia. These uses of the word "date" are adapted toColumbia, where there's no middle ground between an unattached hookup and a relationship. In fact, when a friend of mine said, "You have to hook up with somebody to get anywhere with him. [...] It's all about sex here." I thought she was just being cynical, until another friend asked me, "Dating? You mean hooking up?"
The kind of dating I'm talking about is different from relationships, and it is separate from hooking up. Columbia students don't have a problem getting into one, or getting any of the other. What I'm talking about is the traditional dinner-and-a-movie culture in which going on a date is not necessarily a bothersome step on the high-speed, high-stress fast track to a relationship; rather, it is a date for its own sake—just a fun night out. In this mindset, dates occur more frequently, with a greater variety of people, with various levels of intimacy. If dating occurred frequently and more casually the whole culture would be a lot less stressful. Dating in this model serves as a form of education, helping students figure out what they want when seeking out a romantic partner.
Hooking up at CU, far from being spontaneous, is often strategically planned. An interviewee said that "You hookup with a friend of a friend [...] because you like them." She added that the process "favors guys who want to get around, and girls get hurt." One of the main factors that contributes to Columbia's hook-up culture, and the resulting void of dating, is fear. "People hook up instead of dating to avoid rejection, so it becomes an entirely sexualized process," one friend said. According to her, people hook up under the false pretense of wanting a purely physical relationship while secretly hoping that it blooms into a relationship, something that she said results in "a delayed ego crush." I am not complaining about the hook-up culture in order to advocate some odd revision from a Puritanical no-sex-before-marriage culture in favor of "no-sex-outside-relationships." Truly casual, unattached hook-ups have their place, but when two people hook-up and one really wants to date, that person often gets hurt. At Columbia, where—as a recent Spectator op-ed stated—males are in their "most-fertile, ready-to-mate state," it is often men who are on the prowl and girls who want commitment.
Another aspect of the hook-up culture is that it limits the number of people students encounter romantically. Hookups come overwhelmingly from extra-curricular activities or from friends of friends. They arise from passion sparked by proximity, often mixed with a dash of alcohol. As a friend of mine suggested, a map of the hookup network at Columbia would create a shape that only someone from SEAS could untangle. At bars, in clubs, and within groups of friends, the connections can be so incestuous that by the end of junior year, many find that they are related by two links or fewer to every person in the room. If dating circles are as narrow as hook up circles, dating can be a dangerous business. So students perceive a casual date as a high-stakes encounter, something too risky unless it is a sure thing.
If they don't date, then how do students get into relationships? Usually, it starts with a hookup. Within the small groups of friends and acquaintances that Columbians manage to attain, people interested in a relationship will go on a group date one night, and—often with a nudge from friends like Jim Beam and Jose Cuervo—fall into each other, thus sparking a long-term relationship. In doing this, students avoid the problem of dating altogether. The approach is not totally without merit—I have a number of friends who have found serious, long-term partners using this method. But this method is markedly different from dating as a form of edgy, scary, fun self-exploration; instead, dating is a product of a situation that has been heavily analyzed and determined to be as low-risk as possible.
Some of my friends delude themselves into thinking that "dating is a thing of the past," and that it has been entirely replaced by the casual hookup, our generation's contribution to the world of young American romance. But the hookup is nothing new. At dinner a few weeks ago at V&T with David Alpern (CC '63), an editor for Newsweek, he talked about how when he was a student, the large first-floor lounges in Hartley and Wallach were used as "petting parlors." While the terminology may have evolved, hooking-up was as much a part of life at Columbia forty years ago as it is today.
At many big state schools, especially in the South, dating culture is centered around Greek life. Sororities and frats—as well as ROTC programs, where they exist—host a calendar's worth of social events, formals, semi-formals, and galas. The fact that the social scene is so focused on Greek life creates a different problem. "If you're not a member of the right sorority, it's almost impossible to get dates," one friend told me, before going on to list a number of dates and relationships that her friends had gotten into through the sorority scene. It's a double-edged sword, to be sure, but the presence of a culture of dating, to hear her explain it, pervades entire campuses, making casual dating a greater possibility. Here at Columbia, Greek life is too small to be a serious factor.
Recently, one of my friends and I, procrastinating while writing papers, spent a few hours talking about relationships. In the span of twenty minutes, she said both "I want to find love" and "I would never ask anybody out on a date." Her comments, echoed across campus, are the proof of how untenableColumbia's dating situation is. Here, surrounded by 8,000 bright and intelligent (if characteristically awkward) peers is the only time when such a staggering array of people will present itself. It is the best time—the only time, really—to ever figure out what one wants. College is about all kinds of education—academic and personal—and if we don't date, to present an awkward cliché, we're not doing our homework.
If nothing else, dates provide a pretext to explore New York City. During orientation, I recounted to a group of freshmen the great dates available to them as New Yorkers: there are Yankee Stadium and the Bronx Zoo in the north; the Staten Island Ferry and Coney Island in the south; you have Café Lalo, Lincoln Center, and Bethesda Fountain on the Upper West Side; and the Nuyorican and Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East. Raised on the great screen romances--Breakfast at Tiffany's, Annie Hall, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and even friggin' Two Weeks Notice—these freshmen were already familiar with all of my suggestions.. But when I ask older students how many of these options they had explored, the answer was almost without exception a sheepish shake of the head.
Perhaps Columbians are ready to change the way dating works. While students say "that's the way it is, that's how it's always been" about dating, they also express their frustration. The anger is palpable. Throughout all my interviews, I found my friends getting tense, hitting tables, and occasionally shouting at me. One person I interviewed did the whole thing jumping up and down, gesticulating, and yelling, "Dating at Columbia is bullshit!" This campus, storied for being a site of revolution and reform, is calling out for a solution to the problem of the frustrating state of love at Columbia.
In conducting interviews for this piece, I was struck by the number of students who said they would never ask somebody out. Men and women, gay, straight, and otherwise, regardless of race, religion, or major, it is an exceptionally common thread on a diverse campus. I wince when I think of the single-minded focus on hookups, which comes with a familiar pattern that my interviews more-or-less confirmed: freshmen hope for a good lay, sophomores tire of looking, juniors make another attempt to make something of their time here, while seniors wonder whether or not they have.
The thing that galls me is that students, at least the ones I've encountered, actually want a dating scene on campus. So why doesn't one exist?
Putting aside this big question for a moment, it's interesting to note that despite the fact that there is so little dating, the word "date" itself is prevalent. People use phrases such as "Butler date," "club date," and "group date" to describe the scene at Columbia. These uses of the word "date" are adapted toColumbia, where there's no middle ground between an unattached hookup and a relationship. In fact, when a friend of mine said, "You have to hook up with somebody to get anywhere with him. [...] It's all about sex here." I thought she was just being cynical, until another friend asked me, "Dating? You mean hooking up?"
The kind of dating I'm talking about is different from relationships, and it is separate from hooking up. Columbia students don't have a problem getting into one, or getting any of the other. What I'm talking about is the traditional dinner-and-a-movie culture in which going on a date is not necessarily a bothersome step on the high-speed, high-stress fast track to a relationship; rather, it is a date for its own sake—just a fun night out. In this mindset, dates occur more frequently, with a greater variety of people, with various levels of intimacy. If dating occurred frequently and more casually the whole culture would be a lot less stressful. Dating in this model serves as a form of education, helping students figure out what they want when seeking out a romantic partner.
Hooking up at CU, far from being spontaneous, is often strategically planned. An interviewee said that "You hookup with a friend of a friend [...] because you like them." She added that the process "favors guys who want to get around, and girls get hurt." One of the main factors that contributes to Columbia's hook-up culture, and the resulting void of dating, is fear. "People hook up instead of dating to avoid rejection, so it becomes an entirely sexualized process," one friend said. According to her, people hook up under the false pretense of wanting a purely physical relationship while secretly hoping that it blooms into a relationship, something that she said results in "a delayed ego crush." I am not complaining about the hook-up culture in order to advocate some odd revision from a Puritanical no-sex-before-marriage culture in favor of "no-sex-outside-relationships." Truly casual, unattached hook-ups have their place, but when two people hook-up and one really wants to date, that person often gets hurt. At Columbia, where—as a recent Spectator op-ed stated—males are in their "most-fertile, ready-to-mate state," it is often men who are on the prowl and girls who want commitment.
Another aspect of the hook-up culture is that it limits the number of people students encounter romantically. Hookups come overwhelmingly from extra-curricular activities or from friends of friends. They arise from passion sparked by proximity, often mixed with a dash of alcohol. As a friend of mine suggested, a map of the hookup network at Columbia would create a shape that only someone from SEAS could untangle. At bars, in clubs, and within groups of friends, the connections can be so incestuous that by the end of junior year, many find that they are related by two links or fewer to every person in the room. If dating circles are as narrow as hook up circles, dating can be a dangerous business. So students perceive a casual date as a high-stakes encounter, something too risky unless it is a sure thing.
If they don't date, then how do students get into relationships? Usually, it starts with a hookup. Within the small groups of friends and acquaintances that Columbians manage to attain, people interested in a relationship will go on a group date one night, and—often with a nudge from friends like Jim Beam and Jose Cuervo—fall into each other, thus sparking a long-term relationship. In doing this, students avoid the problem of dating altogether. The approach is not totally without merit—I have a number of friends who have found serious, long-term partners using this method. But this method is markedly different from dating as a form of edgy, scary, fun self-exploration; instead, dating is a product of a situation that has been heavily analyzed and determined to be as low-risk as possible.
Some of my friends delude themselves into thinking that "dating is a thing of the past," and that it has been entirely replaced by the casual hookup, our generation's contribution to the world of young American romance. But the hookup is nothing new. At dinner a few weeks ago at V&T with David Alpern (CC '63), an editor for Newsweek, he talked about how when he was a student, the large first-floor lounges in Hartley and Wallach were used as "petting parlors." While the terminology may have evolved, hooking-up was as much a part of life at Columbia forty years ago as it is today.
At many big state schools, especially in the South, dating culture is centered around Greek life. Sororities and frats—as well as ROTC programs, where they exist—host a calendar's worth of social events, formals, semi-formals, and galas. The fact that the social scene is so focused on Greek life creates a different problem. "If you're not a member of the right sorority, it's almost impossible to get dates," one friend told me, before going on to list a number of dates and relationships that her friends had gotten into through the sorority scene. It's a double-edged sword, to be sure, but the presence of a culture of dating, to hear her explain it, pervades entire campuses, making casual dating a greater possibility. Here at Columbia, Greek life is too small to be a serious factor.
Recently, one of my friends and I, procrastinating while writing papers, spent a few hours talking about relationships. In the span of twenty minutes, she said both "I want to find love" and "I would never ask anybody out on a date." Her comments, echoed across campus, are the proof of how untenableColumbia's dating situation is. Here, surrounded by 8,000 bright and intelligent (if characteristically awkward) peers is the only time when such a staggering array of people will present itself. It is the best time—the only time, really—to ever figure out what one wants. College is about all kinds of education—academic and personal—and if we don't date, to present an awkward cliché, we're not doing our homework.
If nothing else, dates provide a pretext to explore New York City. During orientation, I recounted to a group of freshmen the great dates available to them as New Yorkers: there are Yankee Stadium and the Bronx Zoo in the north; the Staten Island Ferry and Coney Island in the south; you have Café Lalo, Lincoln Center, and Bethesda Fountain on the Upper West Side; and the Nuyorican and Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East. Raised on the great screen romances--Breakfast at Tiffany's, Annie Hall, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and even friggin' Two Weeks Notice—these freshmen were already familiar with all of my suggestions.. But when I ask older students how many of these options they had explored, the answer was almost without exception a sheepish shake of the head.
Perhaps Columbians are ready to change the way dating works. While students say "that's the way it is, that's how it's always been" about dating, they also express their frustration. The anger is palpable. Throughout all my interviews, I found my friends getting tense, hitting tables, and occasionally shouting at me. One person I interviewed did the whole thing jumping up and down, gesticulating, and yelling, "Dating at Columbia is bullshit!" This campus, storied for being a site of revolution and reform, is calling out for a solution to the problem of the frustrating state of love at Columbia.
// JOSH HIRSCHLAND is a junior in Columbia College majoring in Urban Studies. Originally from suburban Detroit, he is also a deputy news editor for the Spectator.