Hooking Up Sober

We’re a small school. And inherent in that are various characteristics and ways it affects our daily lives. You’re forced to talk in classes capped at 15. Our size affects our academic lives, our athletic lives, our social lives, our extra-curricular lives. And, notably, our dating lives.

So what does this mean for a panther-on-the-prowl? Well if Johnny Lee was “looking for love in all the wrong places,” I guess you could say that we’re “looking for love in all the same places.”

Because how easy is it to fall into a pretty steady routine here? Running from this class to that practice to that club, our days easily become regimented. And, I’ve noticed that weekends don’t offer much variation either.

When it comes to finding a potential hook-up partner, your choices are limited. As a first-year, it might not seem so right away, because you’re constantly meeting new people and everyone is full of possibility. But by the time you get to be a junior, it feels like you’ve gone to the Nordstrom’s End of Season Sale a day too late, and all that’s left are dresses in outlandish patterns, shoes that would be too small to fit an elf and hats that no one could wear outside of a Gatsby themed party. And in most cases, it’s not even that luckier and earlier customers have weeded through your potential partners first, but that you have weeded through them. Maybe he hooked up with your best friend or worse you hooked up with his best friend, and you’d hate for your kissing style to be conversation over a casual game of Super Smash Bros.

But here’s the biggest characteristic of hooking-up at a small school: You can run, but you can’t hide.

If you made-out with someone on a sweaty Atwater dance floor and would rather not see him the next morning as you’re battling the hangover from hell, you can’t be positive you won’t. You could run into them at the waffle machine in Ross, searching for an empty carrel in the library, picking up a package at the mail center. There’s no sea of faces for you to get lost in. Just like you can’t hide in the back of a classroom if you didn’t do your reading, you can’t hide from a one night stand if you snuck out of his room at 6 a.m.

But that’s cynical me. Romantic me, however, can’t help but ponder: Maybe the qualities that make hooking-up at a small school difficult are the same ones that make it wonderful?

So there are fewer options: well, think of it as boutique shopping. You could go to Nordstrom and have to search through racks and racks of clothes to find something you like, or you could go to a boutique where all of the products are high quality and after one rack the dress of your dreams jumps right out at you. Midd kids, I like to think, are the highest quality. And so, instead of weeding through thousands of dudes, meaning thousands of disappointments for you, you have a much smaller number of boys (or girls) to skim away until you find The One.

And maybe you can’t hide, but if you don’t want to hide you can’t get lost either.  If you walk home from a party absolutely ga-ga over the guy you were just kissing, you can know with certainty you’ll see him sometime over the next week. And it’s totally organic. You don’t have to stalk that guy you danced with and didn’t know his name because, 1) you probably knew his name, and 2) you’ll run into each other naturally, eventually.

Even though it can be hard to not get frustrated with what seems like a lack of option or an inability to disconnect your hook-ups with your day-to-day life, I would argue that it’s a little price to pay for what a hook-up can become. Midd kids have a pretty high chance of marrying other Midd kids.  Maybe that’s because our admissions does such a good job of picking those 2,500 students, that they’re all the most eligible bachelors and bachelorettes of the collegiate world. Maybe Johnny Lee should be looking for love at Middlebury. Because God knows once he finds her he’s sure to see her again, and again and again. And again.