Dating at Yale: true romance or wet dream?

"I think it was when I saw Carl* in the library, way back freshman year," Liz Hazen, TC '00, says, remembering her first encounter with longtime squeeze Carl Francis, TC '00. "I didn't know who he was, but I was looking for the Xerox machine and he looked nice, so I asked him where it was. He showed me. That was it. But there was something in his eyes, in his gesture as he pointed me in the right direction..."

With the approach of Valentine's Day, we can do no better than attempt to unravel that most ineffable of mysteries—love at Yale. Hazen and Francis have struck gold. Not only have they dated steadily for over two years, but they recently decided to seal the deal. "Carl proposed to me on the stroke of midnight this New Year's Eve," Hazen gushes. "That was sweet!"

For most of us, the story of this couple inspires admiration and a bit of envy. A happy Yale couple, after all, is about as anomolous as a pair of virgins at Florida State. After over 30 years of coeducation, Yale boys and Yale girls still can't really communicate. This seems strange. After all, "Yale is potentially a great place for gagging/mad-for-it blokes," London import Andrew Chan, SY '01, notes. Quoting Tolstoy, he adds, "Nothing is so important for a young man as the company of clever women." Not only does Yale bring together clever people, but it does so in the traditionally amorous setting of the university. Rachel*, a junior, is baffled. "Yale should be a veritable matchmaker," she says. "The structure of any university facilitates social interaction to a degree that will never be reproduced in our lives after we graduate." By all rights, we should have a hotter singles scene than spring break in Cancun.

Busy and lonely

So why isn't true love knocking down our doors seven nights a week? It has a lot to do with Yalies' overwhelming seriousness. Hazen is as surprised as anyone that she managed to find Eli romance. "Yale is a poor environment for pursuing love," she says. "People are focused on their own interests and pursuits. The stresses of an intense academic environment seem to drain the life out of many people. It seems as though the time a relationship requires seems like too much of a sacrifice to many students here."

Just as schoolwork inspires an all-business attitude from most Yalies, so relationships are often burdened by weighty hopes. "Relationships are different at Yale for one reason," Blake Hounshell, TD '00, says. "The presumption of `marriageability' makes for higher expectations and commitment levels than in the outside world, where there is no built-in filtering system." But without such expectations, argues Amy Justman, SM '00, Yalies likely will not consider a relationship a legitimate time investment. "If there's no long-term future," she says, "you'll never be placed ahead of sports, a cappella groups, homework, job interviews, whatever."

Not only are we all occupied, explains Jules*, a junior, but each of us is occupied in his or her own eccentric way. "The type of person that goes to Yale is a character," he says. "It means that you're always going to meet interesting people. The flip side of that coin is that the more peculiar a person is, the less that person is like you, and similiarity of outlook is the fundamental basis for all companionate relationships. That's why most people here have only a few close friends. And by that logic, a lover, partner, whatever is even harder to find."

Or maybe Yalies are just love-illiterate. "People just don't swing here," Francis says. "You're either married or dead." Andrea Anushko, JE '01, agrees that at Yale, the boogie of casual dating is a lost art. "I get the impression that people here really don't have that much experience in social situations with the opposite sex," she says. "I know many guy friends who are afraid to ask a girl out for fear of getting shot down. What's the big deal? If she says no, you ask someone else."

According to Jules, however, casual dating at Yale can be a bigger deal than one intended. "Although this is a moderately large school, it's extremely small socially," he says. No one wants to step on anyone's toes by dating so-and-so's ex. Someone once put it to me that, once you've dated someone at Yale, you're damaged goods. That's a tough pill to swallow, but probably true." In accordance with our intense self-involvement, we Yalies are an unusually fragile lot, unable to accept that most basic of relationship truths: in almost all cases, your romantic property once belonged to someone else.

In Anushko's eyes, however, the property isn't so hot to begin with. "When I visited Yale on my recruiting trip," she says, "I don't know if it was the awe of the place or what, but something blinded me, making me think that every guy at Yale was good-looking. Upon arrival freshman year, I realized I had been fooled." Despite this disillusionment, Anushko readily admits that females are not the only sex that finds fault with the Yale student body. "I've heard several complaints from my guy friends that girls just don't care enough about how they look." Anushko considers that assessment overly general—and a trifle unfair. "Everyone has their wind-pants days," she admits. "Some more than others. But I think most girls do try and look nice once in a while." Most Yale women must battle the stereotyping instincts of Yale men. According to Anushko, "A hard part about being a female at Yale is automatically being stereotyped as either a dedicated student who is ugly, or a princess who can't do anything for herself."

Looking for entropic ecstasy

A small but brave proportion of Yalies nevertheless puts aside the stereotyping, the physical shortcomings, the expectations of marriage—or even the expectations that love could last more than one night. This segment of the community swears by the random hook-up. Quoting Woody Allen this time, Chan notes, "Sex without love may be an empty experience, but as far as empty experiences go, it's one of the best." But Chan himself identifies only with the first clause of Allen's adage. Hijacking another bit of wisdom, this time from the film adaptation of Anais Nin's Henry and June, he intones, "Abnormal pleasures kill the taste of normal ones."

At Yale, Chan's latter citation bears out: random hook-ups induce much more confusion, regret, and barbarity than they do happiness. Often, a stranger's bedside manner can be so ham-fisted as to extinguish any prospects for passion. Lewis*, a senior, recalls one inebriated and awkward evening. Meeting his intended at Toad's, he reports, "Honestly, right when I walked in, this girl was all over me. I was so drunk, I didn't really know what was going on. I had gone to a formal with her earlier in the year, but I hadn't shown any interest in her. Even though I was quite drunk, I knew I didn't want to hook up with this girl. I even went to the point of telling her, `I'm not going to hook up with you.' She didn't seem to mind this decision on my part. So we kept grinding away. At some point, she asked me if I would walk her home. Being the gentleman that I am, I said sure.

"So we walked back to Branford. I wanted to walk home then, but she convinced me to go up to her room. Right as I got into her room, I knew I wanted to get out of there. Somehow, she was able to get me into her bedroom and then on her bed. She was quite smooth in getting me there, too. However, once I saw what was going on, I got righterryof there. I was pretty drunk at this point too, but I resisted the guaranteed booty."

Lewis' story illustrates a common failing of potential random hook-ups: one party's interest, however zealous, does not dictate an equivalent response from a would-be companion. Another potential problem is stumbling upon odious sexual peccadilloes. The latter circumstance is best illustrated by a now-classic slice of Trumbull lore, recounted by Jerry*, a senior: "A girl I knew in Trumbull hooked up after a raucous party with a young man in Trumbull. They went back to his room, clothes were lost, and various carnal activities took place. During the encounter, though, the girl was surprised that the guy repeatedly and not-so-subtly attempted to initiate what you might call `back-door relations' with her. She rebuffed his anal advances, and after a few minutes of more standard intimacy, he retired to the bathroom.

"Relieved to have the awkward encounter over with, the girl snuggled up to the pillow to catch some z's. Her hand felt something under the pillow, and her curiosity compelled her to pull out a recent copy of a low-budget porn mag entitled Anal Gangbusters. Needless to say, she didn't stay the night."

Random hook-ups can at least give the parties involved a hearty, emotionally distant laugh later on. But lurking just above random hook-ups on the commitment scale lies the most heart-wrenching Yale relationship category of all: the hook-up with commitment. This relationship bears little more emotional intimacy than a random hook-up, yet the time involved can often lead one party or the other to mistake it for the real thing. Most often, this occurs when an older Yale man strings along a much younger Yale woman. "If you are a freshman woman dating a second-semester senior man," Justman notes, "don't ever think that you are more than `a lot of fun.' And don't leave too much of your stuff—emotional or otherwise—at the other person's apartment."

Love in the time of scholarship

Would-be successful relationships get short-circuited by excessive self-seriousness, social timidity, and concerns over "marriageability." Meanwhile, random hook-ups serve better as fodder for dining hall brunch conversations than outlets for bottled-up passions, and hook-ups with commitment leave the more idealistic party with serious emotional scars. What, then, is a lovelorn Yalie to do? Perhaps there's no hope but to stubbornly press on, trying to learn along the way from the few happy couples among us. Against all conventional wisdom, Rachel maintains that Yale institutions actually help romance along. "One boyfriend was my completely blind date for the Freshman Screw, believe it or not," she reports. "We had a perfectly okay time, didn't speak for six months, then hung out one night with a mutual friend, and ended up dating for a year." Rachel notes that the awkwardness of the Screw may have impeded a more rapid coupling. Nevertheless, she gives concrete evidence that the much-maligned event can actually be a viable matchmaker.

For her current relationship, Rachel gives at least partial credit to Yale's residential design. "I'm convinced that my current boyfriend would be a stranger to me now if it weren't for the college system," she says. "He just transferred to Yale this year, and I only know him from repeated encounters around the college and in the dining hall. We would probably never take any of the same classes or have the same friends otherwise."

Not only do Yale's events and structures facilitate occasional romance, but the University has even blessed us with some bona fide hot spots. Hazen and Francis, in separate interviews, named the same locale: the top of the Art & Architecture building. Rachel admits that most of her romance has been confined to dormitory rooms, but she adds hopefully, "We're planning to try the Silliman climbing gym."

Having taken a tour of Yale's desolate romantic landscape, littered with broken hearts and miscommunications, Hazen and Francis's success story bears a closer look. To make a successful Yale romance, both parties would seemingly have to agree that, against all lessons of pop culture, it may actually be sexy to be smart. Ha-zen is adamant in her response: "Yes, yes, yes. And how!" Francis's answer, while more enigmatic, connotes at least general agreement: "Anything that rhymes with `fart' is sexy."

Hazen has a simple rule for romantic success: "Have a sense of humor and be able to relax. Most of the fights Carl and I have occur when we take ourselves too seriously." Francis expresses Hazen's wisdom more succinctly: "It's important that you find someone who isn't an asshole." For both, the most crucial survival tactic has been an ability to find humor in stressful situations.

And love can indeed be stressful. Who among us hasn't been thrilled by a steamy romance, only to become confused when it enters a more mundane phase? Hazen has a deep-seated belief that true love is a complex affair. "I don't think that being `in love' is a state which can be sustained," she says. "I love Carl—that is unconditional and constant—but being in love occurs in brief flashes for me. It is as if our love is this steady flame and every once in a while there is an exciting and dangerous flicker." To make love work, one can hardly do better, at Yale or elswhere, than to blend a sense of humor with a realistic assessment of human emotions.

Book-smart, heart-sick

While we could all learn from Yale's romantic successes, most of us are strangers to Yale romance, or have found it only to let it slip away. Justman recounts her trajectory: "How I found love at Yale: I asked the Davenport CA to come fix my computer. And I live in Silliman. How I lost it: When I thought that he should get out there and have more experience, and he wholeheartedly agreed."

Each August, Yale welcomes some 1,300 new book-smart boys and girls. But only rarely does a Yale freshman, having devoted endless energy to academics and extracurriculars, enter with a functional knowledge of what makes relationships work. And in a community stocked with similar specimens of romantic retardation, the odds of learning relationship etiquette at Yale, and then practicing it with a truly special significant other, seem long.

Anushko's initial impression of Yale love was rosier than the reality that followed. "I expected to be dating once in a while," she says, "and to find someone that shared the same interests I did and held the same values I did for the same reasons I did. I have yet to find anyone like that here. Most people meet their mates in college, so I guess I thought I eventually would find someone that I really enjoyed spending time with.

"At the rate I'm going now, it looks like grad school may be the place to find a husband. Although I think I might steer clear of the Ivies."

*Names have been changed to protect anonymity. Graphics by Shawn Cheng. Photograph of Carl Francis, TC '00, and Liz Hazen, TC '00, by Cayte Pushkareva.

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