Early on the evening of Twain House’s semiformal, a woman decked out in a one-shoulder spandex dress and strappy sandals ran down the hallway, frantically waving a stuffed ladybug. The theme of this dance was “Prom-iscuity,” a clever little name that conveyed equal measures of titillation and irony, as the best things do for 20-year-olds. The woman, it should be noted, was quite beautiful and entirely sober.
“Look!” she shouted to no one in particular. “I found a date!”
Then she embraced the stuffed animal and cooed.
Strange? Not exactly. Although 70.6 percent of Stanford undergraduates reported having sex in 2000 (72.3 percent was the national average), the prevailing student sentiment holds that the dating scene on campus is as alive as that plush toy. “No one dates at Stanford,” goes the old adage.
The problem might be partially one of semantics. For many students today, the phrase “to date” has anachronistic, let’s-split-a-malt-at-the-drive-in overtones. Among those who do use it, the verb can signify any number of arrangements: to go out twice, to be a bona fide pair, to be one academic year shy of engagement. Researchers say the ambiguity makes students not only skittish about labeling their relationships but also confused about how to actually, well, date.
So-called “date functions” do their darnedest to get the ball at least lumbering along. Fraternities and sororities throw as many as five per quarter per house. Dorms usually host two during the year—a “Screw Your Roommate” (more irony), in which co-habitants find dates for each other, and some kind of formal dance, where students are on their own to find an escort. And, of course, there’s Viennese Ball, which manages to sell hundreds of student tickets—always in pairs. But nothing, not even a one-shoulder spandex dress, guarantees companionship.
Stanford doesn’t have a monopoly on datelessness. Last summer, a study sponsored by the conservative Independent Women’s Forum and conducted by the Institute for American Values examined the heterosexual dating culture at four-year colleges across the country. Half of the women responding said they had been asked on fewer than six traditional, guy-pays-the-way dates since starting college. But 40 percent reported having had at least one “hookup,” defined as a physical encounter, often with a stranger, that might include anything from kissing to intercourse but never includes expectations—not even a phone call the next day.
Hookups “come with a lack of expectations about emotional depth,” says Carole Pertofsky, director of health promotion services at Stanford’s Cowell Student Health Service. But that might not be students’ preference. In Cowell’s triennial health survey, relationship concerns consistently top the list of anxieties. And the Independent Women’s Forum study reveals that 63 percent of women enter college hoping to meet Mr. Right.
There are plenty of explanations for the courtship crisis. Some chalk it up to an ever-increasing achievement ethic. Students report that some peers say their rigorous schedules and ambitious goals leave little time for an evening with someone who might not turn out to be The One.
Others point fingers at the women’s movement, arguing that it eliminated traditional courtship rituals but didn’t offer alternatives. Instead of redefining roles, it muddied expectations; instead of women asking men out now, no one’s asking anyone.
Or perhaps coed dorms, which proliferated during the late 1960s and the 1970s, are to blame. Men and women who brush their teeth at side-by-side sinks, researchers say, may start to see each other more as sisters and brothers than as dream dates. “There are so many ways to hang out with people without having to knock on someone’s door—whether that’s doing laundry or going on a dorm ski trip or whatever,” says Donnovan Somera Yisrael, ’90, MA ’90, a community health specialist at Cowell.
Laying aside the semantics and studies and analysis, we wondered what undergraduates’ romantic lives really looked like. So we shadowed four students on a Saturday night for a peek.
BRANNER HALL, 8 p.m.
Just around the corner from the Branner lounge, where two freshman guys are recovering from a milk-chugging contest—one gallon in one hour (no easy feat, they say; they’ve both puked twice)—you will find the cluttered two-room triple belonging to Valicia Saucedo, a freshman from Lindsay, Calif., and her roommates, Lucy and Kate.
And J.P.
J.P. Schnapper-Casteras, from Bellevue, Wash., is Valicia’s boyfriend. They met during Admit Weekend when Valicia showed J.P. how adorable he was by pitching his glasses into a fountain. They remet five months later in Branner, where, coincidentally, they were both assigned to live. They’ve been a couple for three months.
“Three months and two days,” J.P. corrects.
Where Valicia goes, J.P. goes, and vice versa. They resemble what researchers call a "quote-unquote married couple," which means practically everything is done in tandem—meals, laundry, shopping. It’s essentially the polar opposite of hooking up. And according to the study, the lack of options in between (read: a plain old date) is what frustrates many undergraduates. Intimacy commonly arrives in all-or-nothing doses.
Valicia and J.P. admit to spending a “ridiculous” amount of time together.
“During the weekdays, we have a policy of getting our work done before we hang out,” says Valicia.
But it is a Saturday night, and so the two are one, sharing the wooden chair at Valicia’s desk, the laptop screen glowing behind them. Down in Branner’s kitchen, Valicia has just made warabi mochi, a Japanese dessert she discovered during a six-week stint in Japan over the summer.
“She knows five languages,” says J.P.
“Nuh-uh, I’m fluent in two and know pieces of three others,” Valicia says, shoving J.P. She laughs and rests her head against J.P.’s shoulder. She assumes this position frequently.
One theory about undergraduate dating has it that students go on dates after and only after they’re a solid pair. It applies to Valicia and J.P. Until three months and two days ago, they spent time together only in the high-ceilinged hallways of Branner. Since then, however, they’ve been out to dinner a few times. They’ve been to the symphony and to Berkeley for a “random midnight trip.”
Tonight won’t be a date night, though. Valicia has some reading to do. Maybe they’ll go dancing at the Sigma Chi party later.
“He is such a good dancer,” Valicia says.
“I am not,” J.P. says, shoving Valicia.
In the end, their night ends up being one of those languid, aimless affairs so typical in freshman dorms: hanging out, doing a little bit of work, hanging out some more after J.P.’s roommates come back from a 2 a.m. Jack in the Box run, then finally calling it a night.
“J.P. and I just tend to enjoy each other’s company,” Valicia wrote later in an e-mail. “We spend a lot of time talking and laughing about things. This was another one of those sorts of evenings.”
THE ROW, 10 p.m.
Jake Gardener, a junior from Newton, Mass., has the swagger of Bruce Willis and the inflated arms of Popeye. A Sigma Chi fraternity member, he plays midfield on the lacrosse team. He loves lacrosse, but his No. 1 love is partying with his boys. That doesn’t always leave much room for girls. Last year, he ended a three-month relationship with a “very cool girl.” It was his longest relationship at Stanford. He’s had a few hookups since.
“Not having a girlfriend doesn’t hamper anything I like to do,” he says.
The members of the men’s lacrosse team are sponsoring a party tonight at 650 Lomita. They’re supposed to meet up with the women’s team at the “ridiculously early” hour of 9:30 p.m. Jake and his boys don’t leave the Sigma Chi house until almost 11.
At the party, a woman approaches Jake immediately. “We need your loud voice,” she says. She wants him to organize the men and women into two lines.
Jake stands at the top of the stairs and screams out instructions. His voice isn’t loud so much as enthusiastic. Everyone applauds.
Another woman approaches wearing a fur hat with earflaps. She gives Jake a hug.
“Nice babushka,” he says, “but you need to get in line.”
Out of earshot of his boys, Jake admits three things: he’s ready for a girlfriend; one of the women here would make a really good girlfriend; he’s too much of a wimp to do anything about it. If he didn’t know her so well, it’d be easier. He could invite her to one of Sigma Chi’s date functions. But they’re “stuck in the deep friend zone,” he says.
One of Jake’s boys walks by and gives him a friendly slug. Jake keeps talking. Last quarter, he took a woman out to dinner a couple of times. He took her bowling. She came to some Sigma Chi parties.
“Do you think I was dating her?” he asks, somewhat plaintively. “I don’t know what people call dating.”
HAMMARSKJÖLD HOUSE, 10:30 p.m.
Janice Chyou, a junior from Vancouver, British Columbia, is the founder of Interact, a student group that visits dorms to talk about how to form healthy relationships, romantic and otherwise. The group was inspired by a seminar on the psychology of shyness that Janice took with professor Philip Zimbardo her freshman year. Janice also has a personal perspective on Stanford attachments of the romantic kind: her own 18-month relationship with a fellow student recently ended. But she’s not someone to sit and brood. A counselor at Cowell, which sponsors Interact, told her she was a “thinker, but also a doer.”
On this Saturday night, Janice is a doer of laundry. She does it diligently, creasing the multitude of T-shirts and clipping her pants onto pant hangers.
Surely there are better ways to spend a Saturday night than sorting your socks. Janice isn’t defensive about that, but she does make a point of saying it’s not typical. She’s been studying for the MCAT most of the day and had a late night last night. She and three friends went to see Tosca at the San Francisco Opera and hit a Belgian café in Hayes Valley afterward.
Interact has given Janice the skinny on the dating crisis at Stanford. She says students often tell her they’re scared about being shot down if they try to initiate a date. They’re also scared about being distracted from their studies and the Stanford experience in general. They almost always express frustration—that it’s hard to meet people, that there’s no place to go (especially without a car) and not much to do on a date around here, anyway.
The inverse is Janice’s dilemma. She has a place to go (Viennese Ball) but no one to ask. It’s just a few weeks away, and there’s no way she’d miss it. Social dance is a passion of hers. There are lessons to be learned in the footwork and spins, she says. It isn’t just about leading and being led, but about two people sensing and striking complementary rhythms. “In the past, a guy would pull you forcefully,” Janice says. “Now it’s more of a cue—like, it would be cool if you turned, but if you do something else, I’ll be there for you.”
TWAIN HOUSE, 11 p.m.
It would be easy to mistake Andres Turner, a junior from Los Angeles, for a player. A strand of blue Christmas lights encircles the ceiling of his otherwise dark room. The yearning tunes of Elton John and Dave Matthews tinkle from his MP3 player. He isn’t shy with the hair gel.
But Andres is a nice guy in the well-mannered, good-listener sense, nice enough to be a resident assistant in Twain. It doesn’t feel like an orchestrated maneuver, for example, when he pours a glass of wine for the date he’s invited to his dorm’s semiformal. They raise their glasses, which are plastic.
“Clink,” they say, ventriloquizing the glass.
Andres’s date is 21-year-old sophomore Mary Haw. The two attended Sophomore Formal together a few weeks earlier. They’ve been “hanging out” since, but they haven’t had what Mary calls the RDC (relationship-defining conversation).
Andres is taking an existentialism course this quarter. It doesn’t make any dent in his premed requirements, but it has made a big impression on him. “We talked about Sartre and his concept of bad faith,” he says. “If I were to suppress my transcendence—the truth that I hope this grows—then I’d be in bad faith.”
Translation: Andres doesn’t believe in playing games. He goes ahead and admits that he likes Mary. In fact, he adds, she’s “frickin’ rad.” Mary takes it all in with a red-cheeked grin.
There’s probably more to say, but it’ll have to wait. The semiformal’s bass beats are already reverberating against the closed door. Andres and Mary leave their wine glasses on the desk next to his Sartre book. They pass the woman waving the stuffed ladybug and head into the lounge, where students are dancing—stiffly—to Britney Spears’s “I’m a Slave 4 U.”
A group of female Twain residents spot Andres. They encircle him. “Go Andres!” they scream. He raises the roof. He smiles over at Mary.
Just two months later, Andres and Mary broke up. Time was to blame, says Andres. Neither of them had enough of it to get the relationship off the ground and “work on the things we needed to work on.” But it should surprise no one that in the Stanford tradition of perpetual Platonism, the two are “still friends.”
Marisa Milanese, ’93, is a writer living in San Francisco.
This article was modified from the print version of the magazine.
