I find it more than a little puzzling why one of the most aesthetically beautiful campuses in this country is teeming with about as much romance as an auto body shop in Detroit. Surrounded by mind-numbing foliage, picnic hills and postcard ponds, we remain a school much dominated by keg jumps and pong tables and one night stands. Or more like one night stumbles. No one takes walks here, or holds hands, or gazes at stars, never mind all three at once. And no, sex on the Bema doesn't count.
Despite what you may have heard, Cupid doesn't work the tap at AD. Inebriation tends to kill romance faster than body odor, and mung isn't exactly the most attractive cologne either. Beer does tend to promote indiscriminate groping however, which although it may be fun for a while, tends to get a little old when all you do every weekend is lick the beer sweat off some random freshman's neck then spend the rest of the next morning hung over, trying to remember her name and wipe the cashmere off your tongue.
I'm not attempting to condemn alcohol as some hideous social evil -- I'm Irish, it's one of the food groups in my family. I'm simply suggesting that it might not be a bad thing if you actually remembered your weekends now and then. Dartmouth has a long history of drunken social orgies - I've been told that before we went coed, they'd ship hoards of scantily clad Smith women up on flat-bed trucks for winter carnival and auction them off on frat row. Heck, if we wanted an authentic school mascot, we'd be the Dartmouth Mung - on defense we could all cry Boot and Rally.
But shallow basement culture isn't the sole culprit; a strong sense of academic responsibility keeps many of us strung out on caffeine in the reserve corridor till one in the morning. We spend most of the week trying to keep our grades up and most of the weekend trying to keep our liquor down, with no time in between for moonlit strolls and suitors clad in J. Crew bearing flowers.
I think I've discovered why dating at Dartmouth is virtually nonexistent - it all stems from the fact that for some reason asking someone out to dinner here is about two rungs below marriage on the commitment ladder. Dinner at Murphy's, roughly translated into the Dartmouth mentality, means something like, "Yes, I want to bear your children."
This is the only school in the country where "dinner and a movie" means Food Court and some cheesy Mel Brooks flick you rented on your ID from Topside.
Now I'm not saying we need to institute some archaic chivalric code where young men dressed in tweed jackets offer their dates jewelry and fine wines and women let months pass before yielding to their unmastered importunities, but just try and offer to cook someone dinner here without them freaking out and getting fitted for engagement rings.
I would like to hope these sentiments are shared by more than a few of you, but current social trends would seem to suggest otherwise and hope has always been the enemy of reason and the bedfellow of powerball.
