Chivalry Is Not Dead Yet

“Did you see what he did last night?”

“I know, what was he thinking?”

“Did he think she would get with him for doing that?” What did he do?

He walked her home.

“Huh?” was my only response to overhearing this one Sunday morning. It may have bothered me less if it wasn’t me they were talking about.  Why did it bother me at all? Had I done something wrong? Was I wrong to walk my female friend home? I can say with full certainty that I walked her to her door, said “Good-bye,” walked home, and went to bed. What is wrong with that? Shouldn’t that be expected?

A few months and a few more weekends later I think I begin to understand. Like a lot of us here I grew up in an upper-middle class neighborhood, went to a private school – all that stuff. I did grow up in a city though – a safe city, but still a city. From that, I think, I have this inner paranoia, which has yet to evaporate even now that I have entered the Middlebury Bubble.

Flashback. A 16-year-old me standing sheepishly in the kitchen facing the whirling 5’4” Italian-American rage of my mother:

“What do you mean you didn’t bring her home! What, are you stupid? You know what could have happened!”

“Mom, relax – ”

“Don’t you tell me to relax.” She rounds on me with a wooden spoon, held out like a sword. “You bring her home next time.”

This exchange was filled with a number of expletives, many of which were in Italian. The girl in question was my friend from down the street.  My mother’s rage stuck with me though and I never again let her, or any other friend go home alone. Although my mother stands a foot shorter than me, she is still the scariest person I have ever known.

She had a point though.  It wasn’t some misplaced sense of chivalry she was trying to instill in me; she knew the very real dangers of a weekend night in the city, and the more I thought about it, the more I knew it.  I had a close friend held up at gunpoint and several more mugged. There was even a kid a few years older that was stabbed in the chest with a pair of scissors, two inches below the heart, that punctured a lung.

So yes, my mother may have been right. To this day, I think my paranoia is still a little justified. We all take for granted the safety of Middlebury. I have a hard time truly believing it. In the dark basements of social houses as much as I may try to drown my inhibitions in alcohol and loud music, I can’t. Too many people I don’t know, too many people I can’t see, too many mixed signals and intentions. It ends up being stressful.

Yet this stigma remains, surrounding what appears to be the simple act of walking a friend of the opposite gender home. I struggle to figure out why exactly this is.  I certainly understand a woman’s hesitation to be alone with a man when drinking has been involved, even if it is something as trivial as a walk home.

To that degree I would have to think it best that I only offered for my close friends, people with whom I had already established a foundation of trust. Even then it is always best to let a group of people know exactly what you were doing or to go with a group, simply to minimize the stigma and hopefully increase the safety of everyone involved.

Now my “chivalry” (or paranoia) may seem outdated and if there is anything Middlebury has taught me, it is that women are often more capable than me.

Yet I struggle to shake the feeling even within our cozy “Midd-bubble.” So yes, I walked my friend home and didn’t think anything of it. I find it absurd that seeing a friend safely home should be associated with ulterior motives, even if in some cases it is. I’m aware of it, and no matter what people say the next morning, I’ll ask, “Can I walk you home?”