I find that fruit and romance often go hand in hand. Seldom have I met an active UChicago dating multiverse participant whose childhood crush dance card hasn’t featured, at one point or another, a strapping young “Blueberry” or “Pineapple”—ah, code names: the most thrilling way to gamify love. Picture the prospect still shrouded in the rose-colored mist of acquaintanceship, the shivery pleasure of a secret kept!

Albeit less juicy, college has its own equivalent of gamifying romance: snapping and chatting into oblivion with a fleeting fancy—surely outnumbering the times you’ve spoken in person—then zippering the amoebic puzzle pieces of texts exchanged and glances stolen into a Frankensteined dummy relationship during a debrief sesh. Text messages morph into ciphers, all stakeholders suddenly implicated in the cracking. In short, you become Sherlock Hookup in “The Case of the Sneaky Link,” your friends a gaggle of unpaid Watsons.

And then miscommunication ensues, and it snowballs. Suddenly, both Mansueto and the A-level are minefields.

This is paragon “type 4” fun: moderately enjoyable in the moment and deeply not fun in retrospect (see also: drinking too much, pulling an all-nighter, taking Power for your sosc Core). But in some way, we can’t help ourselves. Trained—at great personal and financial expense—to extract meaning from texts, Maroons analyze extensively, until the methodology takes root in every hospitable patch of student life. UChicago hookups and situationships, I’d argue, are like twisted appendages of the Core—they too operate according to the logic of close reading:

Is the “lol” in “lol sounds good.” a deflection? How load-bearing is the period?

All interactions are summed up in a grand relationship calculus and treated as evidence of the counterpart’s “true” level of commitment.

The problem here is that, unlike a text, your bedfellow is an unstable object of interpretation. Mistake your paramour for a text, and you will miss the human inside.

Admittedly, there is a seductive case for overanalyzing to create a fantasy. A caramel-dipped and nutritionally void image of your beau (all potential, no proximity) is oh-so fun to bite into, especially when you’d rather preserve some distance in the relationship. But left to ripen past its prime, the image will spoil. Nobody wants to be cast as your idealized love interest or your Manichean figure du jour. They want to be seen as they are—messier, yes; but with the right person, considerably more interesting.

Now imagine my hand holding yours as I say this: Their “mixed signals” do not exist. Showing ambivalence is a clear signal. Beneath the gritty underbelly of scrolling, subtext, and sloganeering, at our core (ha), we are remarkably transparent creatures, if not through our words, then through our actions. “If he wanted to, he would” is a truism simply because it is true. What often registers as nebulous or indifferent is, more often than not, an aversion to confrontation—with you, or with themselves and their feelings.

Sure, sometimes there really is underlying subtext, and I won’t advocate for ignorance of your bedfellow, Mango, and their needs. But defaulting to overanalysis and speculating ad infinitum without grounding our thoughts in action is a surefire way to propagate misperceptions and let miscommunications develop into reticent dumpster fires. You’ll grind yourself to sawdust playing clue-dunnit in perpetuity, even if you’re a top-tier life-of-the-mind reader. Your hookup will still leave you shook up.

So spare yourself heartache: ask Pineapple your questions directly (easier said than done, I know). Communication is a muscle—embarrassingly weak at first, and then, with unglamorous repetition, not. Evidence may be theoretical at best, but I, as any good Maroon does, specialize in theory, and the theory says: put the magnifying glass down and open your mouth.

Case closed? No. This case is inquiry-based. But at least now that we’re talking, it’s an open book.

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.