I can sum up my attitude towards dating at Dartmouth in three words: Don't do it.
I have exactly three friends (all squash players, weirdly enough) who have thus far managed to forge lasting, happy and essentially balanced relationships at this romantic wasteland we call home. There are others out there too of course, but like these three squash players, I think of them as strange anomalies who just so happen to walk amongst the rest of us mere mortals.
You've probably seen these anomalous couples around campus, awash in an irritating glow of PDA and puppy love. Perhaps they're sharing an order of toasted orecchiette alfredo in the window of Canoe Club, or locking eyes over a chicken parm sub in FoCo (RIP), or maybe they're tittering happily together (read: pissing off the unfortunate soul sitting across from them) on First Floor Berry.
And maybe that happy tittering is indeed representative of a greater nirvana-like happiness that is known only to those in Dartmouth relationships. I'm personally skeptical of this claim, but will entertain it grudgingly for rhetorical purposes.
So entertain we shall. It's freshman year and you've just started dating that amazing person you met on your floor, on your DOC trip or more likely when they started creeping on you during a game of flip cup. It's love! Nirvana! Okay, now what?
We can start by discussing the abject lack of solid date destinations in the Upper Valley. You've got Molly's, Murphy's and Canoe Club, which, by senior year, start to seem about as novel as Chicken Monday. Then you've got Simon Pearce, Stella's and Carpenter and Main for those intrepid car-owning couples who tire of the offerings on Main Street and are willing to throw down $32 for crispy roast duckling. Finally you've got the increasingly grim array of DDS options for the Hanover-bound and gastronomically indifferent.
So you hit up Molly's a couple of times and knock back a few wood-fired vegetable salads. Things escalate quickly and you start sharing the same twin XL several nights a week. (You've got the inside room in your two-room double and your roommate's never around anyway, so minus the horrifically uncomfortable/weird sexual acrobatics necessary when you cram two bodies into a bed that small, it's no big deal.) Before you know it, you're trying to figure out how to coordinate your course loads for the upcoming term. It's love! Nirvana! So what's the problem?
If it's freshman year, you've just sacrificed three months of valuable friend-making time in the blink of an eye. I hate to put it so starkly, but I can speak from experience. It's not difficult to see why: You get wrapped up in the exhilaration and novelty of a romantic relationship when there are no parents around to walk in on you, and suddenly you've become That Girl (or Guy) With The Serious Relationship On The Floor. And why shouldn't it be so? When you jump headfirst into something intense and crazy and seemingly adult, it's easy to want to cling to it, especially when you've just arrived on campus and don't really know anyone anyway.
And getting tagged with the "Serious Relationship" label is certainly not reserved for freshmen. Everyone knows an upperclassman or two who fell off the face of the earth for three terms because they started dating someone. Again, it's not difficult to see why: The greater Dartmouth social scene tends to favor those who are unattached, drinking until the wee hours and looking to keep things as they are.
Because when you're in a relationship, it's kind of difficult to be screaming along to 80s anthems until 4 a.m. with a half bottle of Jim Beam in one hand and a cigarette in the other. (Not that I personally condone or ascribe to such behavior.)
Jim Beam notwithstanding, the fact remains that life at Dartmouth moves pretty fast. And sometimes, when you're in a serious relationship, you kind of start to miss out on things.
And for what? So that you can feel super uncomfortable when you walk into your ex-boyfriend's fraternity when things go South? So that you can be forced into some horrible long-distance scenario when your D-plans don't match up, which results in one of you blacking out and hooking up with your trippee and the other one starting a sketchy fling with a random Spaniard you meet in a bar in Barcelona? Trust me it's rarely worth it.
I'm certainly not saying that the alternative to dating falling back into the forest primeval of people who aren't is especially appealing. And the weird, in-between state of having a semi-regular hook-up is also far from ideal, because one of you is probably agonizing about why you're not dating while the other is actively trying to keep things from getting serious.
Basically, it's a no-win situation. And the only way to really achieve a nirvana-like happiness at the romantic wasteland that is Dartmouth is to accept this fact and move on. Trust me. You'll fare better in the long term if you stick to ordering the toasted orecchiette alfredo for one.
