There’s nothing casual about college relationships

Have you ever noticed that people in college never reallydate?

I mean dating in the “Sex and the City” type manner,where we start seeing someone but only on a low-key level, and thena few weeks or months later, it just naturally breaks off.

Is this form of dating too adult for college?

Not wanting to offend any students who see themselves as adults,maybe I should use the term post-college person.

Or is it that casual dating goes into hibernation during theperiod of our life between middle school and post-collegeeducation?

The dating that occurs in middle school is very primitivecompared to what happens in college, but it also somewhat resemblesthe looseness of post-college dating.

It seems like college students really only reduce themselves toone of two options, random hookups or steady dating, both resultingin the giving of titles, although the former can be somewhatinappropriate, and the latter is the more official boyfriend orgirlfriend.

So is there a problem with the looser form of dating, where weare not held down by commitment or the awkwardness of randomness?Maybe.

Is it as simple as the fact that this is just not collegebehavior, or is it deeper, with explanations as the size of ourschool or our schedules? The problem with size being that,particularly at a small school such as our own, we may be reluctantto date someone for a few weeks and then move on.

Moving through the dating cycle at this constant rate would notonly leave us running out of people to date, but the fear of the”bumping into” situation would be increased.

In an endeavor to find the truth behind why dating becomesextinct after middle school and then reappears after college, Ilooked to friends for some answers.

At UVM, that’s the University of Vermont for you truesoutherners, casual dating also appears to be a term not manystudents identify with.

UVM being a state university means that it is larger than ourpopulation of roughly 5,000 undergraduates.

The numbers lead me to conclude that size of the school haslittle to do with lack of interest in dating classmatesnonchalantly, since at a larger school students would have moreroom to not run into their exes.

This also appeared to be true at Providence College, which is aCatholic school in Rhode Island. The fact that Providence isCatholic means no greek life, thus forcing students to findalternative means to interact with students of the opposite sex(not that being involved in a greek organization is the only way tobe social).

Again and again the same theme seems to appear throughout alluniversities; casual, “Sex and the City” type datingjust does not happen at the college level.

OK, so it doesn’t happen, but why? Is it just because weare too busy to devote ourselves to someone different every fewweeks?

Can we only deal with the hassle-free, meaninglessness ofhookups and the simplicity and continuity of relationships?

Or is it that our lives are so cluttered by constant school workthat we can’t expend our energies on trying to organize acasual relationship with someone?

If this is the case, then once we graduate and move on to havinga job, which usually allows for some free time after work, thismust be where the transformation into the realm of casual datingoccurs.

We are no longer consumed by working after work (studying afterclass), and we are not in a situation where hundreds of”potentials” are put right in front of our face tointeract with on a daily basis.

In physics we learn from Sir Isaac Newton that, according to hisFirst Law of Motion, objects in a state of motion will remain in astate of motion unless compelled to change that state by a netforce.

Newton begs the question: Are we just in a state of constantmotion with our “dating” habits during college and notcompelled to change until the net force of living in the real worldis exerted on us?

Once we are not in a situation where it is excruciatingly easyto meet somebody, we are forced to put ourselves out there to meetsomeone and hope that a casual dating cycle may result in somethinglong term.

With that said, maybe there’s no need to question wherethe casualness of dating goes or why it disappears, but simply thatit just does.

So sit back, relax and have fun with your college relationships,random or steady, whatever your preference, but get ready to revivethose fundamental dating skills from seventh grade later on.