I recently sent my first flitz to a girl that I met briefly at a party. I was nervous, but hopeful. She flitzed me back a day later, agreeing to a coffee date — only to tell me five hours later that she had a terrible habit for flirting and was already involved with someone else. But we still got coffee and had a good time, and I gained a friend in the process.
Flitzing — Dartmouth slang for sending a flirtatious email ‘blitz’ — is not exactly the usual way of asking someone out, but here at Dartmouth, it’s a regular part of campus life. While my friends back home jokingly compare the absurd fonts and color schemes used in flitzes to those of a serial killer’s ransom note, in reality a flitz is anything but that.
Really, it’s a way to show your interest in someone through a funny, personalized and romantic tradition that has persisted at Dartmouth for years. For first-years, this quirky practice can present a fun chance to act on their crushes, and although the concept might be unfamiliar at first, from my interviews, it seemed like new students were eager to adopt the practice.
While sending a flitz is typically done to ask someone out, Daniel Lustbader ’26 believes that it is about much more than simply asking someone to get coffee.
“I think this is kind of pretty indicative of Dartmouth’s culture — that being here at Dartmouth is more than just working. It’s about having fun and building a really tight knit and friendly community,” Lustbader said.
Deha Kilickaya ’26 said that they sent a flitz to someone late one night at the library while trying to procrastinate on their work.
“There was someone on my mind — I just decided to send that flitz, you know, because why not?” Kilickaya said, before proudly adding, “It was successful, in fact. I’m really happy that I did that.”
While the definition of what constitutes a successful flitz is up for debate, in Kilickaya’s case, it meant getting the chance to hang out with a crush.
Although they haven’t yet attempted a flitz themselves, Bo Kim ’26 also had nothing but good things to say about the flirtatious tradition.
“I think it’s wonderful,” they said. “I always think it’s cute.”
Despite all of these positive comments, there is the reality in which your flitz could get rejected. But Lustbader, Kilickaya and Kim all agreed that if you want to reject a flitz, you should at least respond in flitz form. After all, crafting one of these emails takes a lot of effort.
Lustbader said that he thinks that one of the reasons that Dartmouth students do not send more flitzes is because “sometimes people are worried about maybe not getting a response back.”
In short, don’t be one of those people on Fizz who talks about how they haven’t responded to a flitz in five weeks.
To all those looking for flitz-writing advice, Kilickaya explained that flitzes cannot be “bland” and that they must “make your interest obvious” to be successful.
“It’s got to be quirky in the first place. Funny — if it’s a poem, it should be funny, but at the same time, I feel like it should be a bit daring as well,” he said.
While flitzes are typically sent to set up a date or invite someone to a formal, school clubs also take advantage of the hype around flitzing to advertise their meetings. Any Dartmouth student scrolling through the seemingly endless amount of emails that we receive every day has a decent chance of coming across an email or two with the subject line “THIS IS A FLITZ” followed by “just kidding, it’s actually so and so club.”
Even though some clubs abuse the flitz format on the listserv, if you’re ever on the fence about attempting a flitz, I’d argue that the best thing to do is just to press send. Each of us only has four years at Dartmouth — possibly the only place it is considered socially acceptable to send an email that the rest of the world would see as ridiculous.
“Just do it… Go flitz your crush,” Kim said.
