A right of passage for any college student is creating a profile on a dating app. While Tinder has the most notoriety, there’s also a surge in both the hopeless romantic and the horny trying to find their respective matches on Hinge and Bumble. I’ve swapped out pictures and messed with the order on my profile more times than I can count in the hopes of finding my own Peter Kavinsky. While I was stuck in Galucci’s INT course one evening, I swiped through profiles and hoped no one could see the reflection of my screen in my glasses.
I matched with a guy who seemed nice and was fit enough to be featured on my ‘White Boy Of The Day’ private snap story. After my first move on Bumble, we flirted for a bit and ended up making plans for a “date” that evening. The guy (for this article, we’ll call him Dylan) joked as he left my dorm that if he didn’t respond quickly, he wasn’t ghosting, but was simply busy keeping up with football season. I should have been more surprised than I was to learn that he didn’t play on a team himself, and literally meant that ESPN was more important than me.
I laughed and asked him who was playing tomorrow, thinking he’d tell me a simple response like ‘Panthers v. Chiefs,’ or any game he was planning to watch that weekend. Instead, he smirked and said, “football teams.” I was naive enough to think it was a poor attempt at a joke, and so I asked again, “right, but which ones?” Assuming I must have barely even heard of this ‘guy sport’, Dylan sat me down to explain football to me as if it were rocket science. He began with, “there’s two teams, and they play against each other,” and I stopped listening to him somewhere around “they’re trying to go to the Super Bowl, that’s the biggest game of the year.” I sat across from him smiling in the way we’ve all learned to around condescending men, debating if I were going to tell him I had, in fact, seen a football game before (actually, quite a few).
I was consumed with dread, predicting Dylan would challenge me with the classic ‘prove your interests to me’ or just ghost me entirely for calling him out. I have never humbled someone so fast in my life when I decided to tell him about all the football games I have watched— on my tv, when I was on the sidelines as a Varsity cheerleader throughout high school, when a family member of mine was inducted into the NFL Hall Of Fame. His face went bright red and he told me about the time he went to a Raiders game in rebuttal, as if those were equivalents.
This was my first date in college (and probably should have been my last in hindsight), but I continued to see Dylan and other people up until the closure of campus. I found that most men talked to me in the way he did that night; guys loved explaining how busy they were with their 12 unit course load while I smiled and nodded, knowing I was taking 26 myself. Over the past year, I’ve gotten better at saying no to second dates, unmatching from uncomfortable conversations, and even making up reasons to end a date early when my intelligence, body, or time didn’t feel respected.
It has been a slow and painful journey to realize that holding my tongue is not worth a man holding my hand, and I now find a way to intercept any incomplete pass thrown my way.