In the darkest moments of my finals period last term, I looked for anything entertaining to distract me from the 10 pages I had to write in 12 hours. Bored of Facebook stalking and walking back and forth between KAF and Novack, I decided to create a Friendsy account. After attempting to navigate the maze of recognizable faces, I found myself looking at the top murmurs, a collection of the most popular anonymous shout-outs to Dartmouth students.
“Are you the SAT? Because I’d do you for 3 hours and 45 minutes, with a 10 minute break halfway through for snacks.”
Other top murmurs featured a mix of witty pickup lines, sincere confessions and one rather elaborate comparison to the sexual power of an untamed grizzly bear.
As anyone who’s in tune with campus buzz has probably noticed, online dating apps and sites have become increasingly popular among Dartmouth students. Though services like Friendsy and Tinder have aspects that appeal exclusively to those looking to hook up or date, they also serve as an easy way to connect with friends and meet people. For some users, this social factor was what drew them to join in the first place.
“I usually connect with people on Friendsy that I already know outside of the Internet,” Bri Fontaine ’16 said. “I think it’s just a fun site where I can find my friends and see funny things that people murmur about each other.”
While not every relationship that starts on the Internet ends in everlasting bliss, Fontaine mentioned that she knows of at least one current campus couple who met through one of these sites.
While it’s nice to think that all of us are using apps to become lifelong friends or lovers who sit around campfires singing the alma mater, it’s impossible to deny that some use these online mediums to facilitate purely sexual encounters. Friendsy’s features allow users to choose between asking others to be friends, to date or simply to hook up. According to Mojin Chen ’15, Dartmouth’s campus representative for Friendsy, 28 percent of all “friends” clicks, 13 percent of all “hookup” clicks and 15 percent of all “date” clicks are part of a match.
Apps like Grindr and Scruff, both targeted toward queer men, are infamous for being aimed almost exclusively at orchestrating sexual encounters between users. One Dartmouth ’15, who wished to remain anonymous, said he uses Grindr quite often to search for potential hook ups.
“Sometimes it’s nice to just cut out the small talk,” he said. “We don’t have to pretend to be interested in each other’s personal lives and ask about each other’s majors, classes and the internship we did last winter. If I’m just looking for sex, using apps like Grindr is just easier and more efficient.”
The source said he often peruses Grindr when he has a minute to kill, examining profiles and pictures and occasionally engaging in chats with other men. However, he said that he does not use Grindr to make new friends or engage in frequent sexual activity.
“I guess most of the queer guys here already know each other, and if someone’s not out on Grindr then there’s probably not a good chance we’re going to hang out and become friends,” he said. “I also don’t prowl Grindr looking for random sex all of the time. Sometimes that happens, sure, but it’s really just more of being bored and having something else to occupy my mind.”
Unlike other online dating sites, Grindr attracts those looking to hook up because it is enveloped in an understood sexual culture, the source said. Describing it as “the elephant in the room,” he said that hooking up is not discussed openly but remains prevalent.
The small nature of Dartmouth’s campus can also impact the way people use Grindr and the manner in which people meet up for sexual experiences. The anonymous source said that at Dartmouth, there are a significant number of gay and bisexual men who aren’t completely out of the closet. For them, meeting up for the first time can be challenging on a campus that is too tight-knit and interconnected for secrets.
“Once, I invited some guy over to my room -and we weren’t hooking up yet, like just sitting around chatting,” he said. “A girl from my hall knocked on the door, and the guy was super uncomfortable and apparently knew her and didn’t want her finding out. So I had to pretend I wasn’t in the room, so she wouldn’t come in.”
Some members of the Dartmouth community, however, don’t delve into the more nefarious aspects of these apps and websites. Many students said our small campus makes the hookup culture of these sites impractical — one’s almost guaranteed to see last night’s partner-in-crime the next day at FoCo or make eye contact with them in line for mozz sticks at Late Night Collis.
“You can’t exactly be discreet about anything here,” Daniela Pelaez ’16 said. “You can try to keep it a secret for a while, but eventually someone’s going to find out. Someone is always your friend’s lab partner or in a club with your roommate.”
Larry Meadows ’14 agreed, saying that those who request friendships on Friendsy are probably already friends in real life. The anonymity of these sites makes trusting “mutuals” challenging because people may not be who they appear in their profiles, he said. Even when he does use these sorts of sites, Meadows said they are mostly time-wasters or boredom-relievers.
“I’ll scroll through it, but I won’t click on anything,” he admitted. “I won’t be like, ‘Oh I want to hook up with you or I want to date you.’”
While Friendsy, Tinder and Grindr may be notorious for the sexually liberated lifestyle they can enable, it seems that many students see them more as an entertaining distraction than a legitimate tool in the pursuit of love and romance.
“They’re more popular than you would think, but I’m not sure people really take them too seriously,” Fontaine said. “I think they’re just a way to have fun and waste time.”
Students outside the Dartmouth bubble say they use online dating apps for similar purposes.
Hannah Cashen, a Cornell University sophomore, said in an email that she peruses Tinder mostly to be amused.
“Honestly, I’m just curious how hot the guys I’d match up with would be,” Cashen said.
Many students, both at Dartmouth and elsewhere, admit that despite the draws of online apps. they are sometimes cautious to use them for fear being judged by their friends.
Lauren Langer, a sophomore at Wesleyan University, said she intentionally avoids using Tinder and Friendsy because she wouldn’t want people to think she couldn’t “get a date the normal way.”
This idea of a proper way to start dating was echoed by Cashen, who said she would never accept a date offered through an app or website.
“I would feel like I didn’t go about it right or I was cheating the system,” she said.
Though students at Cornell, Dartmouth and Wesleyan claimed their small campuses or rural settings made online tools less useful and more potentially awkward when it comes to meeting new people, Columbia University sophomore Courtland Thomas said in an email that his larger school and urban environment makes these services ideal. A large student body, many surrounding colleges and the ever-distracting presence of New York itself make it difficult for Columbia students to meet each other naturally, he said. The possibility of meeting and dating young people outside Columbia’s campus is a primary motivation for using the apps, since the Internet can connect students to swarms of young people living in the city.
The prevalence of alternative modes for flirting and connecting across college campuses indicates that perhaps the stigma is fading or has even vanished entirely. Here in Hanover, however, it seems that Friendsy will continue to provide more mindless fun than romance, and I eagerly await to hear more about the untamed grizzly bear.
