reading the modern love column in the new york times each weekend, i wonder what i have written if i had actually found the time to enter their "college love" contest. last week's column--the first of the "college love" winners--seemed like a story that had already been done: a girl in a big city bouncing between boyfriends, one short fling fizzling out after another, neither she nor the boys able to commit for long. is this really the epitome of college love nowadays? i wonder if it's not something else...
a sophomore in my sorority is engaged to her high-school sweetheart. several of my best friends have spent at least a year in their latest relationships. my cornerstone recruiter, two years out of college, just married his college girlfriend. 70 percent of stanford undergrads marry other stanford undergrads; of these, more than half marry someone they met while both were at stanford.
perhaps my sample is nonrepresentative (schotastic? hetereoskedastic? yes i'm supposed to be studying econometrics right now...), but i just don't think that random hookups have come to epitomize the college love experience. or have they...?
i've never hooked up with a random guy at a frat party, never gone home with someone i hadn't met until that night just because it seemed like a good idea in the moment. generally, this is probably a good thing... but sometimes, i wonder if i've missed out on some great college rite of passage. i suppose i did kiss (12? 15? 20?) guys at full moon this quarter, but aside from that...
(it's ironic, isn't it, that we fought so hard for so many things--equal rights, political representation, sexual liberation, career opportunities, title ix--and in the end, it all comes back to meeting a man and having his babies. sure, we can hold jobs and play sports in the meantime... but we still don't feel complete without the damn man and his babies. why? does biology trump all?)
i'm really tired right now, exhausted from everything that's been happening and wondering what i should do now. it would be easier just to accept the entreaties and go back and pretend the last 10 months never happened--i wanted to ride things out a bit longer, but i'm also increasingly discouraged by his (re?)actions and wondering just what the hell i think i'm trying to salvage.
i haven't felt like this in a long time now--exhausted, drained, depressed, broken down, whatever you want to call it. i remember last summer--crying furitively in the bathroom every few hours and thanking god that my boss was gone that week and wouldn't notice, eating soup and yogurt for days because my stomach was too knotted for anything else, doing cardio at the gym until i could barely breathe because the physical strain could displace the emotional stress while it lasted.
i just want to crawl into bed and sleep for a very, very long time...then wake up in a new life and new body. i don't want to make difficult choices, face difficult consequences, handle difficult personal relationships... i don't want to do anything except get away from here, get away from it all.
(but this is real life... and you can't run away from your problems, can you?)
indecision is the worst, though--choose A or B and lose the other, but delay the choice long enough and eventually you just lose it all.
(will you save me?) | 
