Dartmouth is a lonely place. To begin with, we go to school in the middle of nowhere. We’re more than an hour’s drive from a sizeable airport. Dartmouth is secluded, and a secluded existence tends to be a lonely one. Moreover, the D-Plan makes it difficult for many people to make and maintain strong friendships throughout all four years. As Matt Goodman '06 said, “Relationships here are very transient. You can be really close friends with someone, and then the next term they leave and are gone for a year.” Friendships are not the only types of transient relationships, however. As many Dartmouth students well know, dating at Dartmouth is all but dead.

At first it might seem to us that a lack of dating is specific only to Dartmouth, but research shows that it is indeed a national trend. A 2001 study done by the Institute for American Values found that only half of college seniors had been asked out on more than five dates and that a third had been asked out on two or fewer dates. Further conclusions of the study were that only 40% of women are happy with the social scene on college campuses and that the “hook-up” culture is rampantly growing. Some of the reasons cited were a growing lack of men in college and many women's general ambivalence to hooking-up. Then certainly, this problem is not Dartmouth specific, but it poses the question: what are some of the internal reasons why dating does not flourish here?

One clear reason, as cited, is the D-Plan. Oftentimes, a couple's schedule may not synchronize very well, with one of them doing a French FSP in the fall and the other being off in the winter to accommodate his engineering major, for example. Furthermore, the amorphous notion of the “hook-up culture” at colleges is very visible at Dartmouth. As early as DOC Trips, freshmen are introduced to all the complexity that is frat basements and the random drunken sexual encounters that many Dartmouth students experience on any given Friday night. Because of a lack of gender-neutral spaces on campus where students hang out, there exists a surplus of environments where only men or only women are in power. More social environments where healthy (meaning equal) interactions between the sexes would clearly allow for a leveled playing field where men and women could intermingle without such blatant power dynamics. But it is hard to prove that if Dartmouth had a more co-ed culture there would be more dating.

Some blame Hanover for the lackluster dating scene. The town’s lack of social options and surplus of moose create a stagnant-for-all-but-the-most-moose-enthusiastic romance environment. Jonathan Essington '09 said, “I think there is a definitely a dating scene here. There are people here who date and have dated. However, I think dating is pretty limited because of the dearth of locations to take someone out to on a date. You can only go to the movie theater or to a Dartmouth sport event only so many times, in my opinion.” While our tiny town certainly puts us at a major disadvantage compared to the students at Columbia or Harvard, for example, there are dating options that exist beyond just couples’ pong, such as dinners at Molly’s, or watching movies in dorms or common rooms.

Student workload, obviously, also significantly contributes to the romance-less atmosphere. Dartmouth's ten-week terms really pack in the work, even for Socy majors. But doesn’t every college student feel romantically stifled by his workload? Not so, says a transfer student from another top-notch institution that runs on the semester system. She says, “The workload here is not necessarily harder than in a semester system, but it is more fast-paced, which basically means not a lot of free time.” So, is it the lack of free time that keeps people from going out? Again, not necessarily. Yu-Hwei Chou, a 3-2 physics/engineering student from Colby put it this way: “As a physics major coming to Dartmouth engineering, I felt that the work load is definitely harder, if not only because we get more stuff crammed down our throats at one go. I wouldn't say that was a cause for my lack of dating though, since I know a lot of engineers who do date. Not dating has been about 50% work related and 50% choice related.” So while the workload at Dartmouth may not be enough to bar everyone from dating, it certainly affects the decisions of many, if not most, of us.

In spite of all of the reasons that exist to keep Dartmouth kids from maintaining relationships, we all have those friends who we refer to as “them”, i.e. the inseparable couple. They are the couple that always hang out together at any spare moment, and who seem to be as attached as a friendly pair of Siamese twins. They study together, eat together, and spend almost all of their precious free time together. While these couples can piss many of us off, their existence kills the idea and myth that no one dates at Dartmouth. In fact, these types of couples make the relationship dynamics here almost seem more serious and involved than what one would expect initially at a place as obsessed with drunken sex, toga parties, and other behavior so reminiscent of Animal House.

So Dartmouth culture can be separated into two distinct groups: those who exclusively hook up, and those who are members of uber-couples. As Kristin Janssen '06 told me, “I think the dating scene at Dartmouth is extremely distorted. There are people who casually hook up, and there are couples that become so co-dependent that they're never seen apart, but there seem to be very few relationships between those two extremes.” But why? Well, the answer is the same as that of the question of why we don't date, approached from the opposite viewpoint. Since the workload, D-Plan, hook-up culture, and single-sex environments all work against couples, the ones that do make it are often stronger and more serious than couples in the adult world. Relationships here are accelerated. All of the precious free time that these off-limits exclusive daters have is spent with their significant others, and as a result, sometimes it only takes one or two years of dating before a Dartmouth couple will decide to get married. In a similar fashion to long-distance relationships, if a couple can survive such odds, then they will be much stronger and firmly devoted to each other.

But for the rest of us, Dartmouth can be a very lonely place indeed. Our need for companionship in a college where we devote ourselves to our studies and where our relationships become “transient” necessitates the breakdown of students into groups with similar interests or backgrounds, whether racial, ethnic, religious, geographic, or other. Why else would there be so many opportunities in the form of frats, sororities, coeds, ethnic houses, and the like? There is a strong desire to feel at home, or to belong to something bigger than ourselves. Maybe this hook-up culture is a result of our need for love in a place where it is hard to find. Or maybe the lack of strong relationships on campuses everywhere illuminates the disparity between hooking up and dating in our culture. Needless to say, the world of college dating that our parents knew is dead and gone.