When I went home a few weekends ago, I felt overwhelmed by college application déjà vu as my little brother spent his Saturday afternoon writing essays and bookmarking pages in the dozens of college guidebooks scattered across the living room. After some requisite big sister teasing, I grabbed "The Insider's Guide to the Colleges, 2009" that was lying on the kitchen table and flipped though to see what it had to say about a certain university that I hold near and dear to my heart.
About three seconds in, I snorted into my coffee mug as I read, "Tufts is a bit like high school, the hookup web is all too easy to trace here."
"Whoa," I thought. "Juicy, semi-controversial material in a college guide?" My thoughts immediately jumped to the hookup web that my friends in Tilton Hall actually scribbled down at the end of their freshman year.
Curiosity kept me reading. The description continued, "Although Tufts' small size is great for classes, it's not so great when you've made out with half your class. The social scene at Tufts is small enough so that you usually know of at least one other person who hooked up with the same person you hooked up with ... Going on dates is not common practice."
A quick check of other schools' descriptions revealed no mentions of their hookup scenes. Hmmm …
So what makes Tufts any different? Are we a school of incestuous, hormone-crazed, instant pleasure-seeking students who can't seem to keep their clothes on long enough to go out on a date or two?
To me, it seems like "The Insider's Guide" is right to a certain degree because, well, I think I actually do know of at least one other person (or four or five) that's hooked up with almost everyone I've hooked up with at Tufts.
There are plenty of students who don't hook up, and kudos to them for sticking to their guns. However, overall, there is a fair share of hookups on campus, and some days it seems like everyone knows each other's business. And while the dating scene is functional, it could be a little more active, especially in terms of casual dating.
But is this really any different than other universities? Naturally, I set out on an investigative report to compare Tufts' hookup scene to similar schools to solve the mystery.
To qualify things, however, I have to admit that hookup culture opinions are anecdotal and personal at best. Most people's perception of the hookup scene is largely colored by their own experiences.
All right, so let's move on to that "research," which I did through e-mail conversations with a few friends.
Both students from Georgetown University that I talked via e-mail to were quick to agree that hooking up on their campus is a lot more common than actually going out on dates. "Good luck walking around in a day without seeing someone you know well and have made out ... or know other people who have," one guy said.
The other added, "I think a lot of people who go to Georgetown are really busy … Relationships are often seen as too serious and getting in the way of that."
On the other hand, students from Hamilton College and Brown University argued that while there's an active hookup scene on their campuses too, there are also plenty of dating opportunities.
My friend from Hamilton who co-hosts a sex talk radio show said, "Yes, freshman and sophomore year there are awkward moments when you realize the guy reaching for the carrots probably received a hand job from your roommate the night before ... But I think this is typical of small liberal arts schools when there is a small pool of potential romantic partners."
However, she added that there are still plenty of dating opportunities that she as well as other students take advantage of.
A friend at Brown thought that his university culture offered plenty of opportunities to date. "I'd say there is a very active dating culture here. It's very common to see couples in restaurant windows, or walking hand-in-hand through campus."
He added that while his current roommate "hooked up with more girls than he would like to admit [and] only vaguely remembers" his freshman year, "he has managed to subdue his raging hormones … and has been dating someone since August."
A guy at Middlebury College, who said he speaks only for the school's swim team and gay community, acknowledged that while the groups he associates himself with are quite different, both foster a lot of internal hookups and relationships. He said that the swim team always jokes about its incestuous hookup links, and within the gay scene he's had ex-boyfriends who went on to date each other. "[It's] just how it goes when there is, for a lack of a better term, ‘limited supply.'"
"What I do wish is that there was more of a casual dating scene where people could just go out … and feel no fears about one date equaling a full-time relationship," he added, echoing many opinions that I've also heard at Tufts.
Overall, I take all this as a suggestion that Tufts' hookup and dating scenes don't deviate too much from the college norm. In some ways, it seems that "The Insider's Guide" is right in its evaluation, but the conclusions it reaches are more college generalizations than Tufts-specific facts.
Basically, we're no worse than other schools of our size. Take it for granted: There are a lot of hookups at any college. You're going to run into That Guy or That Girl again soon, and people are probably going to find out about it.
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Emily Maretsky is a senior majoring in engineering psychology. She can be reached at Emily.Maretsky@tufts.edu
