PrintIt’s Saturday morning, 10 a.m. I roll out from underneath the guy sharing my twin extra long, careful not to wake him. I’m sitting at my desk, checking my email, 15 minutes later when I get a call. “Shane, where are you? Weren’t you going to let me in the office at ten?” I’m late.
Apologizing to the guy now awake but still in my bed, I stuff myself into some trainers and a jacket and run for the door. As I am returning to my suite 20 minutes later, I bump into him letting himself out. His roommate locked himself out, he says. He’s got to go let him in. He left his number on a Post-it. I should call him sometime. We should hang out.
That was two days before the semester started. I haven’t had the time to call since. And I’m not the only one. In the course of writing this article, I spoke to dozens of students about their love lives at Columbia, and I kept hearing the same complaint—that Columbians struggle mightily to find romantic success (even of the single-night variety) here in Morningside.
This is a campus where ambition thrives, and relationships can take a backseat to networking and GPAs. In order for individuals to distinguish themselves academically and professionally, they may need to make sacrifices in their social and emotional lives. Columbia produces Nobel Prize winners and captains of industry. But these best and brightest are still college kids. Are they sacrificing love (or lust) in lieu of more professional concerns?
Between Columbia’s location, its decentralized atmosphere, and the perfectionist students that it draws, we sometimes seem destined for lonely lives of academic and professional obsession. Whether because of fear of rejection, or just because of strings of bad luck, it seems that the majority of Columbia students fall into one of two categories: those who forgo romance in the name of class work, and those who look for love beyond the borders of Morningside Heights.
Too Involved to Get Involved
There is a constant struggle at Columbia to keep up good grades and pursue extracurriculars in order to pad resumes. When ambition is the focal point of college life, it’s difficult to devote yourself to another person. “People aren’t really looking to get together,” says Nora Hirshman, a sophomore at Barnard. “They are in their own little world.” For most, it is a world whose center moves from papers to exams to applications for internships and fellowships—there’s rarely time to build intimate relationships.
This work-till-you-drop mentality, a defining characteristic of life in New York, is a pervasive malady at pressure-cooking Columbia. Time to develop romantic relationships must be fit in amid class time, work time, club meeting time, dinner time, sleep time, and more work time. If the population at large participates in this workaholic culture, even those who would rather play find the surroundings hostile. “The environment does not really promote it [dating] with busy schedules and all the work we have,” speculates Charlie Gillihan, a Columbia College first-year.
Gillihan describes his environment—the glorious John Jay 12—as a sexless locale. What happens when you house 19-year-olds in co-ed dorms without even the hindrance of roommates? Apparently not much. “Almost everybody is completely abstinent. They are too wrapped up in their own work to venture out.”
What does this say about our futures? The pressures surrounding us are not likely to lessen until retirement. If students are too busy for romantic exploration at 20, is there any reason to expect more free time five years from now?
Location, Location, Location
Students at all elite colleges are driven, but Columbians—who choose to go to school in New York City—are immediately immersed in the breakneck pace of the metropolis.
According to an article published last November in New York magazine, single-individual households make up 51 percent of all Manhattan dwellings—by far the largest number of singles in any county in the United States. Perhaps New York attracts solitary individuals in choice of college as well as home and career, and by coming to Columbia we willingly submit to that same rhythm, that solitary lifestyle.
When they do venture out of Butler, many students bypass the bars and frats of Morningside to take in downtown’s vibrant nightlife. They chose to come to Columbia because of its location in the big city, not for a social scene that they could find at any college in America.
Bianca Perta, a Barnard sophomore, isn’t interested in finding romance on campus. “I haven’t even really found people that I would consider dating,” she says. “I don’t really look, I’ve met a lot of people elsewhere.”
For Perta and students like her, all it takes is a swipe of the MetroCard to remove themselves from the equation. Instead of hanging out at a campus party, they head downtown, to bars and clubs much closer to “that other school” in New York—NYU.
“I have been with a few NYU boys,” says Perta. “You meet them in cool environments—it shows a better side of them.”
“I like going downtown,” agrees Elizabeth Bibi, also a sophomore at Barnard and a friend of Perta’s. “I think that is one of the draws to living in the city.”
Small Spaces, Familiar Faces
Morningside Heights is a comfortable, student-friendly neighborhood, but it’s no Greenwich Village. Students at NYU have an endless selection of bars, clubs, and eateries at which to rendezvous. And when they do meet someone, NYU students—whose housing is flung all across lower Manhattan—can walk away the next morning, no strings attached. Columbians aren’t afforded that sense of privacy.
Columbia is a little bubble—which University Provost Alan Brinkley once described as a “postage stamp” campus. The fact that most students live within a 0.5 mile radius from College Walk means there’s really no way to escape awkward run-ins. Hirshman says this awkwardness is her no. 1 reason for not dating Columbia men anymore.
“I went on a few dates with some people,” she says, “It was short and intense—I won’t be too graphic.” But for Hirshman, this “intensity” refers to both emotions and sex, especially after the flings ended. Morningside Heights is a compact area, and avoiding specific people is difficult, even if you don’t share classes or live in the same building.
“Even though we feel like we’re in a big city, I would constantly run into people and it would constantly be awkward,” Hirshman says.
Despite the weekday bubble consuming Columbia, weekends tend to be decentralized, with the campus being deserted. Bars seem to get plenty of business, but the crowds are unchanging. Beyond EC and a few clusters of underclassmen nestled in their respective dorms and suites, dorms are generally quiet on the weekends. Even at midnight on a Friday evening, the streets of Morningside are largely dead, with only a few stragglers spilling out onto the street in front of open bars.
“I think this is a common criticism of Columbia,” Hirshman said, “We don’t have a campus culture, and maybe if we did, people would be more into relationships.”
Weekend after weekend, the same faces show up at the same places. If you didn’t hit it off with someone the first 20 times you saw each other, it’s probably not going to happen. So random hook-ups become less and less likely as the semesters progress. By the end of sophomore year, before students are even legal, who is really excited about the prospects of meeting someone new at a bar in Morningside Heights? You’re more likely to meet a stranger at Butler’s Blue Java—which is hopping on a Friday night—or on the platform of the 116th Street subway station.
For those expecting Greek life to provide anything beyond the occasional fling, Columbia’s frats disappoint. The fraternity scene is certainly no Animal House—frat row does not have the social magnetism here that it does at more rural schools. The parties are tame, and the sexual activities, which most schools’ frats are infamous for promoting, are tamer. After all, even brothers are still Columbia students, with the same Columbia problems.
“I’ve seen less hooking-up in Greek life,” says Randy Subramany, a Columbia College first-year and a Sigma Phi Epsilon brother. His fraternity and others have their share of hook-ups, but random sex is less common here than it might be at other schools.
As for serious relationships, Subramany defies the frat-boy stereotype. He had a girlfriend for several months last semester; but they have since broken up, because of that perennial obstacle—workload. “I really wanted to date,” he says, “But sometimes I could tell that if she had a lot to do she would pick the work over dating.”
Getting Scientific
Even for those who might seek companionship on campus, the fear of rejection can prove an insuperable obstacle. We are a school of type-A personalities, the sort of perfectionists not likely to relish the risk of being turned down by the person who lives down the hall.
And what we cannot explain, we analyze. Chris Crew, a doctoral student in psychology at Columbia, is eager to explain how rejection sensitivity affects Columbians. It “negatively impacts their desire to go seek relationships.” He concludes, “Individuals that are sensitive to rejection have a lower probability of starting a relationship.”
For most Columbia students, this explanation yields a sigh of relief. Finally, something they can understand logically. But romance can’t be solved with an equation.
Hence, we have our workaholics, the abstinent John Jay 12. We have the group of people who are still dating their high school sweethearts long-distance, and what is rumored to be a substantial population of online daters at sites like OkCupid and JDate—where rejection is far less personal.
Are We Alone?
Of course, Columbia students aren’t alone. Other competitive schools are nerdy, too. “I’m not sure if this is exclusively a Columbia phenomenon but at Harvard, we do too much work,” writes Lena Chen, a senior at Harvard and author of the popular blog “Sex and the Ivy,” in an e-mail. “And that’s on top of already being handicapped by lack of exposure to the socialized world (which I’m pretty sure is a prerequisite for admission).”
Chen, of course, is the exception, and because of it she has captured the imagination of mainstream and campus media. Her blog details her most intimate college moments and has earned her notoriety from the Ivy League circuit, as well as Gawker, New York magazine, and the New York Times.
Even at Brown, a school known for its sexual liberation movement and the SexPowerGod dance, which promotes dance floor promiscuity, students don’t seem to be having all that much physical or emotional intimacy. Arthur Matuszewski, an editor at Post-, Brown’s weekly features magazine, writes, “In terms of perception, Brown students, when hooking up, dating etc. are typically at the far extremes of the spectrum.... This leads to an inflated perception on campus of how much sexing is actually going on.”
In a poll released in December 2007, 43 percent of Brown students reported not having had sex in the past semester. In colleges nationwide, that statistic is about 31 percent, according to the American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment from 2008.
Rejection sensitivity is not just a Columbia thing. Maybe it’s a college thing. Maybe it’s an ambition thing. Whatever type of thing it is, it’s there, driving a wedge between the X and Y chromosomes of our student body.
Looking to the Future
But there has to be hope somewhere. Relationships and social situations are constantly evolving entities. They also go beyond the people interviewed for this article and the observations I make as a lone reporter. Relationships beyond long-distance ones, though rare, do exist on campus.
Gillihan, for example, has a girlfriend, a stroke of fortune he never saw coming. “It just kind of happened—before that definitely I wasn’t searching. I was anti-searching,” he says. He and his girlfriend, who both live on John Jay 12, succumbed to floor-cest. “We met bumping into each other in the hall,” says Gillihan. Living next door to your significant other can be risky—especially if you break up—but at Columbia, these relationships tend to be the ones that stick.
For Gillihan, one of the disadvantages of our claustrophobic campus—not being able to escape the confines of a floormate booty call—has become a blessing of sorts, making the relationship convenient enough to work.
No matter how grim things may seem on campus, the mentality that dating someone here is hopeless is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of dwelling on all the reasons for dating or hooking up being impossible, Columbians would do well to take a chance. Go beyond your suite and Café 212. Talk to the girl in line at the deli. Call that guy back. Sometimes, like Gillihan, the pieces fit in spite of the odds. Sometimes, you have to make your own luck.