As I begin my senior year, I find myself questioning where the time went. And by time, I mean how did I get so old that my friends and I have serious conversations about “settling down.” It seems that senior year has caused a frenzy to find someone before cuffing season even begins.
As if school wasn’t already stressful enough.
If you’re a senior, you most likely have the same conversations with your friends over and over again about how there’s “no one” left at the school. As you scratch your heads over potential men, freshmen are thriving with this large, new pool of boys. They could not possibly imagine the struggle of scavenging for a single male who doesn’t have a messy past with one of your friends.
Unfortunately, college only gets smaller as we get older.
Freshmen year, we see infinite possibilities. Whether it’s the accessibility of the Towers or excitement from our newfound freedom, the sky’s the limit.
Sophomore year, for some reason a whole new realm opens up. Now those limitless sea of boys have individual faces. No longer strangers, you can begin to make some real connections to them. The college feels small but cozy. Things are hunky-dory.
Then, junior year approaches and those people that you knew, become people you know too well. You have seen them through all their highs and lows these past two years and sadly you just can’t seem to look at them in a romantic way. By this time, a great deal of your friends have some form of history with about half the eligible bachelors. Now you feel the walls closing in.
The progression of the dating pool is staggering as it is and then being part of a sorority makes it even smaller. It’s almost impossible to find a guy who doesn’t have a history with one of your sorority sisters. Oh, and rumors don’t help either. After crunching these numbers, the outlook is abysmal.
Then senior year hits. You either surrender and wait for the real world (aka bigger sea of fish) or you back pedal – more often than not, a terrible idea. We get wrapped up in the chase for the right guy that we lose all our sanity and go back to the boys who treated us less than we deserved.
LADIES! I get it. I find myself struggling with the TCNJ dating pool myself. But, after writing this article, I’ve began to think we create our own problems. We put too much pressure on the idea of the perfect guy that we dismiss a lot of potential men. We tend to get dramatic as senior year approaches and think we’re doomed to be single forever (you’d be surprised the amount of times I’ve heard that this past summer).
But we’re 21-years-young with our whole life and career ahead of us. Focus on you and everything will fall into place. The TCNJ dating pool may seem small but remember it’s not the be all end all. I have to remind myself of that too.