The wild, wild ways of college romances in the dating app era |
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Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story
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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit
ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures
Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story
More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice
The wild, wild ways of college romances in the dating app era
Campus love is a chaotic mix of situationships, strict wardens, and tech interventions. But oh, what's not to love?
The college campus is the last frontier of IRL romance. Love grows manically over canteen samosas and chai. Drama is spilled like chutney across corridors, hostel stairwells, and eventually on Instagram feeds. Everyone is available to date, even those still entangled with their school sweethearts. Before you know it, someone ends up in the emergency ward, drunk on phenyl, hoping to win back their loved one’s attention. Kids, I tell you.
But the highlight of it all was listening to a 20-year-old talk about the Activa rides she takes to college with her boyfriend. After being “friends” for one year and dealing with multiple situationships on the side, the second-year couple recently made things official on a date at the banks of the Ghaggar River in Panchkula. Imagine the boyfriend waiting outside her class, every day—she comes out hungry and bored to death, and he fixes everything by pulling out a chocolate from his bag. What’s not to love about campus romance?
And yet, even this last surviving habitat of offline romance cannot escape the algorithm. Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook in his college dorm because nothing else could have made him relevant among the hormonally charged young adults prowling for romance—or, at the very least, a fling. Now, Stanford University has another groundbreaking........