The Pressure to Find Love
BY MAYA MODELLI WITH ART BY MEGAN BORMANN
With the dominance of hookup culture in college dating habits, and a lover seemingly one swipe away, why do we find ourselves clinging to the elusive ‘great college romance’?
There is a set of external pressures that make us feel almost obligated to be in a relationship. Several interviewees described their parents or family members asking about significant others, the dreaded ‘are you seeing anyone?’ question at family gatherings. For most people, it's easier to just say that you're not seeing anyone and face a look of pity, than to explain ‘it's complicated’ to your grandparents.
Growing up I felt like so many of the adults around me had met in college, regardless of if they’d dated in college they still met in the college setting. A lot of the people that I spoke to had a similar experience, where they had adults in their life that they looked up to, who were examples of the college romance narrative.
A student interviewee, who we’ll call “T”, said “Socially, it [college] feels like the right time, and right place.”
To some extent it feels as if we are almost indoctrinated into a ‘timeline’ of life events that we need to follow. That college and the varying checkpoints that come with it are obligatory to getting the full ‘college experience’.
“If you don’t meet the love of your life playing darts at tap this weekend,” Kat Johanns, a sophomore said, “ you just gotta pick yourself up and try again next weekend.”
One of the pressures people feel from social media is from an internalized devotion to achieve an ever-changing standard of perfection. One of the most important facets of this perceived perfection is being in love. There is this assumption that everyone is better off in a relationship, and that this relationship must be expressed on social media.
Several interviewees said that they felt the most isolated, and arguably the most pressure to be in a relationship when people around them are in relationships, as well as when their social media feed contains relationship content. T said, “I think that people get a lot of validation from relationships.”
Relationships, especially college relationships, provide people with the validation that social media has cultivated a taste for.
The pressure to be in a perfect relationship comes from an overwhelming feeling of ‘FOMO’, or the fear of missing out. Where being in a relationship is a function of obligation, and we feel a compulsory need to desire something that others have. In her TED Talk, Bea Arthur therapist, entrepreneur, and women's advocate, describes this as the ‘culture of comparison’ where we feel the need to compare our choices against those other people make, and that in doing so Bea Arthur says that “Happiness becomes a moving target.”
Traditional media targeted at Gen-Z typically shows a high school romance. When we have seen and idealized the high school romance for so long and we don't get that same experience in high school it's almost as if the desire for a relationship as a byproduct of academia lingers and is shifted towards college, and suddenly the teen movie that wasn’t a part of the highschool experience becomes the expectation of the college experience.
There are psychological factors that play into the desire to be in a relationship as well. According to Arthur Chickering, a developmental psychologist, there are various vectors of development that often happen in a postsecondary education environment, including this idea of developing a sense of identity and autonomy. But that doesn’t just happen, college students go through a set of experiences that give rise to their ‘coming of age’. This is a period of time that can be isolating, and people have a natural desire to belong, seeking an intimate relationship can be a way of avoiding the feeling of loneliness.
This idea of a college relationship may have been conceived from familial pressures and traditional media, but really, the compulsory need we feel for the ‘great college romance’ comes from our own ‘culture of comparison’.