At minimum, three “Core” things are prebaked into the UChicago experience:

1. The wind will physically knock the wind out of you.
2. Someone well-meaning in your sosc seminar will speak for minutes without properly forming a sentence (a spectacular anacoluthon we call “participation credit”).
3. Your first week will carry all hallmarks of a psychogenic fugue state.

Inhale, exhale. Bartlett’s air already stirs thick with the feral energy of nearly two thousand 18-year-olds waving off teary families and empty U-Hauls. Welcome to O-Week. Here, without p-sets or parents, typical spatiotemporal laws snap, crackle, and pop. As with an airport terminal at dawn or the Reg’s A-level at midnight, this threshold condition is a liminal space. Time halts its forward march, mercifully truncating “where fun comes to die” into, well. Where fun comes.

Per its original coinage, a liminal space defines a rite of passage. This makes sense. We’ve edged toward college our whole lives, our late childhoods stir-fried with coming-of-age reels, parental mythology, and songs assuring us this is our aesthetic peak. In true UChicago fashion, we instantly register this ephemeral freedom as a scarce commodity. Many first-years act as though not scoring a Pret study posse and full roster of prospective suitors by Opening Convocation will leave them marooned in the hyper-intellectual cold of a Hyde Park winter. Objectively false but wildly motivating. No wonder we scramble. We want to suck the marrow out of this limited-edition smorgasbord the second it hits our plates. Scarcity, even imagined, is a hell of a drug.

Now add the biology of the whole horny-pocalypse. In 1979, the term limerence was coined to characterize obsessive romantic attraction and hypervigilance. Limerence runs largely on dopamine (hot neurochemical promise of reward) and oxytocin (a cable cinching you to some Ex Libris McSteamy with ferocity). Shake these into the ambient brew of O-Week, and voila! This is the Limerent Cocktail. Under its influence, the spatial disorientation of toilet-sharing with 14 strangers ensues! Brain over-indexed, you’ll start to question everything. Is that a copy of Kant in his pocket, or is he just happy to see me?  When a simple fling descends into nine weeks of unresolvable debate, you may even christen it your very own sosc. Please, drink responsibly!

Eventually, of course, the liminal bubble of O-Week doesn’t so much pop as pressurize. Around week two of fall quarter, dynamics built within the temporary vacuum must withstand the icy chill of real life. Sometimes they do. The real danger is emerging proverbially hungover, backpack sagging under the weight of your actions. Suddenly, the eyes of a hundred million people (30 kids in your house lounge) converge on you. You worry that Sidechat will descend like Midway gulls to cleanly strip your skin. But fear not: a small mercy exists. All these supposed carrion-eaters are, in fact, occupied by their own imagined reverse panopticon. Your peers are just as hyper-aware of themselves as you are. Breathe. An O-mance may fizzle out. By winter, your Cathey crew will jumble and reshuffle. Human relationships always function like this, diastolic and systolic like hearts, reaching outward to brush against new shores before anchoring in.

Crucially, in all this frantic relationship maneuvering, remember that intimacy counts in more denominations than one. We catastrophically underinvest in friendships, and then we wallow in stale dorm air, wondering where the hollowness came from. Too long has romantic love been treated as the only intimacy with real cultural currency. Perhaps the most radical, subversive thing you can do this week is to take a friend as seriously as a crush. Invest in your roommates with reckless sincerity.

Beneath any Life of the Mind sloganeering and posturing, we are all rookies navigating youth sans syllabi. It is everyone’s first time living a life, which makes comparing this one to any prior reference point quite inconvenient. You will make ridiculous social missteps or misread signals; you’ll often feel confused.

Be forgiving with yourself as fall quarter sobriety settles in. Do not, however, lead a toothless life. College is for biting into things, and if you wait too long, your pearly whites of yore will go soft in your mouth. Extend grace to your peers. Use protection. Communicate. Godspeed, and may Phil the Phoenix grant you safe and pleasurable passage into the fold.

Yours in theory and practice,

Tour Guide Sadie

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.