It’s May when I hit submit on my housing application, which stressed the value of an all-female residence as of the highest priority. The decision to forgo the co-ed option was not an easy one. I faced an unexpected social restraint against the concept because living in a co-ed dorm was the norm when it comes to the college experience. Several high school girls could not understand at all why I would choose this option over the exact same dorm which had boys living across the hall. I began to face the notion that if you live in an all-female dorm that you are suddenly tied to an obligatory oath of celibacy and anti-men sentiment. It was surprising because no one in my life really expected me to willingly sign up to live in an all-female dorm because of the stereo-types—I didn’t fit them.
I hadn’t gone to a previous all-girls institution or practiced a devout fear of the male species. In fact, the people who were the most surprised with my decision to live in all female dorm were my parents themselves, given that most of my closest friends in high school had been teenage boys.
So, why’d I do it?
I didn’t expect to, but the facts just worked in my favor. I knew what I wanted out of my dorm experience: someplace beautiful with windows, a place that was a good amount of quiet at night, a place that fosters community. I wanted to know who I lived next to and who I lived with; I wanted people who couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
Themed housing, I think, facilitates this sort of environment automatically since you are living with people who already have a vested interest in a similar passion, but my small liberal arts school didn’t have that option for first years. On a gut instinct, I felt as if all-female housing would recreate that for me.
Of course, I understood the hesitance I was faced with after. I was going to be living with girls and only girls, a vast quantity of them. There would be an overwhelming amount of estrogen in the air. Very few people go through high school meeting female counterparts who offer them a sense of solace and safety because of the societal competition that environment begets. In high school, girls were more likely to be cliquey and sharp-mouthed than the kind of sister figure I wanted. Trust was hard to build when you had boys, grades, and your own growing up to think about.
I’ll be honest, I was also afraid—not only of the fact that maybe I had just signed up for a rerun of Mean Girls but also that I was going to be moving to new place thousands of miles away from home. The boys I knew in high school had no guarantee of being the boys I’d know in college. Despite being armed with my knowledge from a significant amount of YA literature on the concept of “the college boy” and, furthermore, “the college boyfriend,” I was still cynical about the male gaze. At the same time, I knew I didn’t want to isolate myself from that energy because it had been an important part of my life so far.
Was it the right choice?
A month and a half in, all my anxieties which once had haunted me have dissipated into the air. I love living in an all-female residence, and it’s frankly been saving my life since the day I moved in. I’ve been blessed with treasured privileges, such as cleaner bathrooms and the ability to walk to the shower in just my underwear with no judgment. However, the best part of living in an all-female dorm has to be the incredible people I live with. My hall mates are the girl gang I always dreamt about in high school, full of strong, smart, independent women who are not afraid of men and will let me cry on their rugs when I have a bad day. Women here help other women, and this lesson, I know, will stick with me way past my freshman year. I only wish it was a mindset that I could see more of beyond the warm luxury of my residence hall.