Before coming to UChicago, I’d been around the block enough to know the block.
I have both consummated a relationship with a piercing (right conch) and commemorated its ending with one (navel). Bracketing this relationship was a gap year, men on several continents, and mounting certainty that love and intimacy are the most special things about being alive—and that I would never again participate in them.
By nature, I’m a hopeless romantic; by choice, a deliberate holdout. Like a naturalist in a field blind, I intend to be an operating scholar of the UChicago dating multiverse. See, I like my men the way UChicago likes ideas: better in theory than in practice.
Which makes me either exactly the wrong person to write this column or exactly the right one.
This edition of Hardcore Curriculum resurrects a 2009–10 Maroon column of the same name in which two students—Anna Boyle (A.B. ’12) and Chris Chavez (A.B. ’12, A.M. ’13)—fielded their readers’ most scalding questions about sex and relationships head-on. My iteration will offer campus anthropology, cultural criticism, and the occasional confessional from someone who has done the reading and declined the practicum. I’m Sadie Laurel, named after my mom’s therapist. Excess is my coauthor.
Consider this your syllabus.
What I’ll affectionately label the UChicago dating multiverse has ballooned—not only in sample size but in platform diversity. Sidechat Yak Matches, Unswiped@UChicago, good old-fashioned DataMatch, and, most recently, Iru’s 414 romancepalooza, show that most everyone is hungry for a meet-cute. Hell, even Dr. Boner, the trusty condom-bearing skeleton in Max P’s Flint House, has seen his contraception supply run bone-dry (ha).
But somehow, there’s a glaring disparity in the non-hookup relationship department. At least qualitatively, we’re not quite a “dating campus.” But why? Some hidden, sexless facet of our prided nerd culture? A chronic, embedded resistance to putting ourselves out there—one so long-standing that it’s been used for unofficial UChicago merch sloganeering since 2005 (see: “The University of Chicago: Where the only thing that goes down on you is your GPA”)? Surely we cannot be where love goes to die.
We are all edging ourselves—romantically, that is. And this isn’t to point fingers at avid situationship-ers or single doters—we’re all trying our best in this cutthroat scene—but to say there is a certain eroticism in leaving things unresolved, one that lures UChicago students like a moth to a flame or first-years to fourth meal. Such a narrative logic, I argue, is exemplified by the hit HBO rom-dram(a) Heated Rivalry.
Have you ever tuned in to a hockey game and thought, “This is just missing a certain animal magnetism?” A dollop of artfully placed and thoughtfully timed thigh, pepperings of tasteful (explicit, but not gratuitous) pec-grabbing, and a sprinkle of distant stares, each one a perfect, palpable cocktail of taut suspense and outward nonchalance? Heated Rivalry offers all that and more in six no-fluff doses of lethal perfection (erection?), tying 10 years of lovers Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov’s slow-burn goodness with a tidy monogamous bow only in the final episode. Simply put, for all its mainstream fanfare, the show hinges on one deceptively simple element: sustained tension. The unresolved mothers the erotic.
This plot propeller is increasingly common in contemporary romance and fan culture. To put it mildly, “slow burn” is having a moment. But the effect is charged up the wazoo in Heated Rivalry, and its reception on campus has been no small potatoes: cue the weeks-long hungry Sidechat post stream, Heated Rivalry study breaks, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality’s distribution of Heated Rivalry–themed promotional stickers, et cetera.
Doesn’t this all sound too familiar? UChicago students suckle on the unforgiving teat of delayed gratification in perpetuity. We Maroons live for the thrill of the hunt, even academically—nine weeks a season, tensions spiking in intensity, until we release them all in the last episode of the quarter, our culminating hurrah: the primal scream. Our social and intellectual economy runs on sustained tension, which explains why such infertile grounds for commitment have paved our campus culture. Ambiguity and anticipation are the real Maroon Dollar.
But just as Shane and Ilya’s relationship finally reaps its well-earned emotional payoff, so too can we find whatever it is we’re holding out for. Only when we open ourselves to the possibility of resolution can we meet our match.
Are you navigating the UChicago dating multiverse too? Whether it’s a Sidechat success story or a “slow burn” disaster, Sadie wants to hear about it. Submit your campus dating stories, suggestions, or questions here.
