Turn Your LOVE LIGHT ON!! - Rated CURIOUS-A Must Read
By: Lauren Halperin

My best friend Kristina complains to me all the time on the phone. “Why can’t I find a nice guy. There were supposed to be all these nice guys in college that we were supposed to meet and one was supposed to ask us to marry them when we were 25. Where are there?” Ah, Kristina, you are not alone. It’s one of the things college women wonder about most. Where are all those men whom we’re supposed to fall in love with? Where is that wonderful guy our mothers told us we’d meet?

At colleges around the country, women are looking around and questioning themselves, did I miss something? This is one of the main causes for miscommunication within relationships in college between guys and girls, especially within the minds of women. Girls are taught growing up that a prince charming will sweep her off her feet, carry her to his castle and take care of her/love her for the rest of her life. Personally, I blame Disney. Regardless of how serious girls take their relationships or their desire to get married while their in high school or sometimes even college, that Ally McBeal syndrome takes over and by 27, women find themselves seeing themselves single at thirty lurking right around the corner. It’s frightening.

So what exactly is going on in the mind of a college girl when it comes to relationships? It’s one of two things. Option 1) why haven’t I found my future husband? The next guy will probably be him. He’ll be wonderful and romantic and sweet and we’ll have a fantastic relationship. Or it’s Option 2) dating around in college is so much fun. It’s so relaxing not to worry about being in a serious relationship. I’ll save that for after graduation. I don’t want to give up that random hook up I had at the frat party last weekend. What was his name again?

If you’re a guy, you can see the confusion. As far as guys are concerned, I see them wanting generally one of two similar things in college as well: either dating seriously or dating around (sound familiar? See above paragraph.). Which doesn’t mean a guy who dates around doesn’t come across a great girl and dates her seriously and it doesn’t mean a guy dating seriously has a hard breakup and starts to date around.

And this is where the miscommunication comes in. The really big problem comes in when a girl who wants to date seriously meets the guy who wants to date around, and vice versa. Technically, the one who wants to date around is getting what they want, a casual date, no feelings (which can change, I’ll leave room for that), and no commitment. Everything is casual in the land of dating around. But then what about the one who was looking for something more? They are left with a glow, thinking they’ve found someone great, thinking they’ll have a date for the next weekend as well. You know who you are. You sit by the phone waiting for it to ring like a Dorothy Parker short story.

He’s not going to call. It doesn’t help that the media feeds mixed messages about what goes on in the college dating world. If you’re watching Felicity, all college relationships are these huge dramatic events that alter lives and cause you to miss your finals because you’re basking in the glow of love. If you’re watching Road Trip, it’s OK to cheat on your girlfriend. Check out Down to You (don’t worry, no one else did either), and you won’t know what to make of dating it’s so screwed up in this movie.

Almost every major network show featuring twenty-somethings right out of college has relationships as a major theme throughout. Check out Jack and Jill, First Years, or even repeat early episodes of Friends, they teach that when you’re twenty five you’re searching for a relationship. And according to television, dating options don’t get better as you get older. By the time men and women are in their thirties, the dating game seems only much more difficult, as shows such as Will and Grace, current episodes of Friends, Ally McBeal, and especially Sex and the City portray. (And don’t even get me started on what Temptation Island taught people about staying together vs. dating around.)

Everyone knows that the average marrying age is about 25 for women and slightly older for men, closer to thirty. That’s a scary thought for women in college. If you graduate at twenty two, it means you have three years to find someone, get to know them, see that their your soul mate, get engaged, plan the wedding—which sometimes takes longer than all the things before, depending on who you are—and get married to be average. Men don’t seem to have this problem. A quote from Sex and the City sums up perfectly the theory behind why. “Men are like cabs. They drive around dating women and picking them up, but their light isn’t on. When they want to get married, they turn their light on. And the next woman they pick up, they marry.” It makes perfect sense. It’s a great answer to the reason to why in college, a guy breaks up with a girl saying ‘I don’t want to be in a relationship right now,’ and then you turn around and he’s in a serious one. His light wasn’t on.

In other words, around college campuses guys and girls are walking around with their lights blinking on and off. It would help maybe if we all walked around with light bulbs on our heads to better signal to other whether or not we are looking for relationships by whether or not our lights were on, but then rejection would hurt more. Can you imagine how terrible it would be to have your light on and go up to someone else with their light on and miraculously, they turn their light off? Your light would dim and flicker, to say the least. I hang up the phone with Kristina and wonder why it’s even worth going out there looking anymore. But as the Mirror Has Two Faces teaches: “while it does last, it feels f*&%ing great.”