It’s that time of year again. For those of us on the quarter system, the last two weeks have been shifting computer windows between Canvas and skimpy bikini shopping, between the dread of finals and the anticipation of that Caribbean vacation with your girlfriends.
To parents, “spreak” brings forth thoughts of the infamous Girls Gone Wild franchise created by Joe Francis, whose adult-entertainment empire featured college-aged women partying on spring break and exposing themselves on camera. Why else would college students take a week to congregate in promiscuity, underage drinking, and a sometimes dangerous or potentially fatal “YOLO” mindset?
Sun’s out, fun’s out
To us college students, spring break, wherever it may be, wherever we may congregate, is about letting loose. Especially at Nerdwestern, it’s a rare opportunity to forget unbearable pressure and experience the liberation of being a newly minted adult, or in the words of rapper Khalid, “Young, Dumb, Broke.”
This spring break, I’m watching my friends spread out across the world’s beaches from a distance. I couldn’t have a proper spring break if I tried: having been recruited to NU for college debate, our season schedule simply doesn’t permit it.
From afar, I want to unpack spring break from the perspective of someone close enough to see it but far removed enough to analyze it: an observer unable to engage in such a sacred practice. I’m not just thinking about the Girls Gone Wild, but the “Girls Gone Home,” the “Girls Gone Broke,” and all the girls in between.
girls gone home: the introvert’s dilemma & Mom’s spaghetti
It’s week nine of the quarter. You have three exams over the span of two days. You’ve been studying like crazy. If you’re at all involved in Greek life, you’ve been juggling a formal or two between visits to Main, followed by Mudd. The weather’s playing with you: one day the sun will come out for the first time in months, and the next, it’ll be snowing (but the gross, slushy snow). You love your friends and your roommates, but by God, you can barely stand any of them at this point.
You’re impatient. Cold. Burnt out. Sleep-deprived. Your social battery is so low, you’re surprised you’re still functioning.
Ready to party in Cabo for a week straight?
While some of my friends had exam weeks merciful enough and pockets deep enough to go home before the great spreak migration, others finished their last exam Friday, hopped in an Uber to O’Hare, and showed up in the Bahamas that night. For those girls, I am utterly dumbfounded by your strength and scared of your resilience.
Even for my most social friends, I can sense that the exam-paradise turnaround can be difficult, if not overwhelming.
Once, during a particularly passionate rant about the dangers, morally and physically, of spring break, my mother said, “I mean, do they just hate their families?”
It’s important to note that hyperbolic, hypothetical questions such as that one are part of my mother’s boisterous, New York Italian personality. As much as I love my family, a week at home can sometimes feel just as overwhelming as the idea of a week at a nondescript resort on blue waters.
But I get what she’s getting at, and I have a few friends who feel like a week in Fort Lauderdale is inferior to a week spent with home-cooked meals and the comforts of family.
This year, many of my friends opted out of the group spring break trip to take a trip with their family instead. Friends echo to me that this choice, and the choice to just go home, feel completely and utterly lame.
It shouldn’t have to be a binary, and your choice with a week of freedom says nothing about how social you are, whether you ‘love’ your family, or anything else for that matter. Some people feel more at home with college friends than in their family of origin. Some people, including myself, have kid brothers and sisters they’d see at any chance they can get. Some people just miss their dog. I know I do.
While discussing the artificial realities of spring break choices with a friend, she exemplified this point. She’s genuinely one of the most social, likable people I know, and I admire and fear her level of friendliness and social stamina. This spring break, she’s headed to Costa Rica. I told her I was worried people would judge me for my modest trip home and early return to Evanston. She replied:
“My family’s two hours away, and I’m an only child. I miss my parents, and I miss my boyfriend, but I usually don’t go a month without seeing them. If I were you and lived that far away from my family, especially younger siblings, I’d blow off everybody and anybody to go see them.”
When I open the map feature on social media, I’m pleasantly surprised to see that a large chunk of my friends are spending their spring break at home, even if it’s just a few days. The farther away my friends’ homes are from Evanston, the truer this seems. But each person’s situation is their own, whether they just need a week recharging alone and a home-cooked meal or a day spent tanning, a cold, brightly colored drink in hand. That’s part of the Spring Break Fallacy: that we all want the same things, and if we don’t, we’re doing it wrong.
So no, Mom, my friends don’t hate their parents.
And to that girl who echoed “You’re going to North Carolina for break?” with a sneer, you’ve never met my almost-eight-year-old sister who claims she can speak to birds.
girls gone broke: cancun or bust
For some, it seems unfathomable to justify the price difference between the cost of a week spent at your friend’s house on the coast of somewhere not in the Midwest and not on a lake and the cost of that resort in Cabo. You protest, lightly, that maybe the resort down the street that’s a little bit cheaper but a lot less prestigious might be the right choice. You’re thinking about the enticing lack of zeroes if you just went to visit your friend in NYC.
But your quiet protests go largely unheard, and that trip to NYC feels more unrealistic but undoubtedly tantalizing. You want to ask your friend if, instead of going to Cabo, you all could just go to her house in the Hamptons. But you feel like you’d be simultaneously exposing your lack of funds and inviting yourself to her house.
The permutations of financial situations are infinite: whether your parents are supporting you, whether they can support you, how much you’re paying for Northwestern, how much Northwestern’s paying so you can afford it here… yet the financial aesthetic is monotonous; singular. It’s nobody’s fault, but it creates social expectations and shame: suddenly, all your savings from that summer job for a vacation you’re not sure you want seems like a small price to pay.
girls gone silent: the value of an aesthetic instagram feed
In social psychology, there’s a concept called “pluralistic ignorance” that wraps the spring break fallacy up nice and neat, bow and all.
In December, we know we’re headed into a dark, cold winter designed to single-handedly crush our spirits. Winter quarter is a doozy, to say the least. From week one, you’re already thinking about spring break, about going where it’s warmer, or really, going anywhere but Evanston, Illinois.
Huddled together, you and your girlfriends daydream about what you’ll do for spring break. Privately, you and each of your friends have doubts or uncertainties about the ideas you’re eagerly floating: cost, effort, going home, your dog, alternative but unconventional trips…
Each one of you might, and likely does, have hesitancies about this idyllic vacation that seems so… unrealistic.
But no one says anything. You each privately reject the normative spring break plans and would quickly opt out in favor of something more reasonable, more low-pressure, homier. Yet, you fear you’re the only one with these reservations, so for the sake of the group, you charge on.
This is pluralistic ignorance: the idea that we all silently disagree with or have reservations against a norm, but fear we’re the only ones, so we remain silent. It’s because of this pluralistic ignorance that we, as young college students, engage in a litany of experiences, choices, and stereotypes we might not agree with.
Pluralistic ignorance is the lifeblood of the spring break fallacy. It’s what upholds this image of euphoric recklessness, extravagance, and rewarding risk.
Pluralistic ignorance is resilient, even when we prevail. For all the people reading this from their family vacation, bed at home, or modest trip, I’m sure you’ve felt some level of regret and FOMO from opening Instagram. Post after post of taunting: the aesthetic prize of the months-long endeavor it took to get to this beach in Jamaica.
But social media sites like Instagram inflate a minority until they seem ubiquitous. Sure, you’ve counted 15 stories from your friends in Cancun by now, but you have more company among peers who opted out of spring break than you do those who didn’t.
No one understood the difficulty of being a twenty-something-year-old girl on Instagram more than Teddy Roosevelt, yes, that Teddy Roosevelt, who is first credited with saying, “comparison is the thief of joy.”
girls gone, everywhere
I guess, ramblings aside, my point is this: parent, college kid, or everyday Joe, everyone’s understanding of spring break is a tad hyperbolic and seems to miss the point. It’s so rare that we get a week off from the stress of being Northwestern students, especially after a winter of attempted light therapies and Vitamin D pills: we should be able to spend it however, wherever, we want.
And my point is not that you shouldn’t buy that ticket to spend the week in the Caribbean with your friends. It’s that you shouldn’t be expected to, especially when there are so many unspoken factors at play.
Whether you’ve chosen to spend this week at home with your dog or abroad with your friends, I hope this spring break is relaxing and fulfilling: you deserve it.