I’m a 19-year-old second-year at one of the best colleges in the country, but when it comes to guys, I still feel like I’m a 13-year-old kid with a terrible perm and a mouthful of braces. Like most University students, I am old enough to do my own laundry, cook my own meals and pay my own bills. We can act like we’re adults, speak like we’re adults and date like we’re adults. And though we’ve thought that we’ve been maturing this whole time, my guess is that most of us are just as juvenile as we were in the 1990s. It’s true that a lot has changed as we’ve grown up, but so much more has stayed exactly the same.
If a guy is mean to you, it just means he likes you — just as it did during our days on the playground. When I spend hours using Facebook Chat, it’s just like I’m in middle school again, wasting time on AIM talking to boys right up until my bedtime. The only difference is that with Facebook, I no longer have to be bold enough to ask for their screen names — only if they’ll be my friends. Today, we have CollegeACB — the “New Juicy Campus” — to spread the same kinds of horrible rumors that we did in high school, only faster than we ever could in our school cafeterias.
We’re still playing games, but instead of hopscotch and four square, we’re playing mind games. A girl I know “accidentally” leaves something behind whenever she hangs out with a guy just so she has an excuse to see him again. So far, this has resulted in three boyfriends and seven non-returned earrings. And, as I type this, another friend is sitting outside on a picnic bench because she knows her crush walks home right by it around this time.
But what is playing hard-to-get if it’s not a game? The word ‘playing’ is right in the title.
I have another friend who likes to give guys special nicknames without them knowing so that she can talk about them in public — and it’s much easier than trying to remember everyone’s names. They’re not quite “Four-eyes” or “Braceface,” but they’re close. The most obvious ones are the descriptive nicknames, like “The Minor,” who was sadly not yet 18, or “Ogreface,” who doesn’t really need an explanation. Then there are the nicknames with the more interesting back stories. “Nun Chucks” got his name when he gave my friend a monster hickey that her naïve suitemate believed was caused when she was hit in the neck with a pair of nun chucks. And you don’t know this, “Guy Who Hooked Up With My Roommate At A Party,” but we’ve been calling you “Kermit” for the past year-and-a-half. I think it’s because you were wearing all green and had a frog voice. Still, my favorite nickname of all time is yours, “Mo.” Sorry to let you know in The Cavalier Daily, but my friends and I all know you as “Voldemort.”
Last year, on my first real date in college, a nice first-year took me out to Lemongrass for dinner. I finally felt like a real, full-fledged adult. I wore a dress and curled my hair and let him pull out my chair and pay for my meal. I was very aware of the fact that we were acting like grownups and was psyched when he said, “So ... you wanna come back to my place?” — a line straight out of every teen movie I had worshipped in the 1990s. Of course I said yes. The plan was to meet some friends at his place to mingle and drink champagne. How much older could I get? I got there and he proceeded to pour stolen champagne into plastic red Solo cups as we sat around on his floor. We were definitely not as cool or mature as I thought we were.
Despite the fact that we act grown up and pretend like we’re living in the real world, I think most of us act just as childish as we did in elementary school. I hope this wasn’t a shock to anyone. The only thing we can do now is keep trying to act mature.
But I’ve got to stop writing — the girl on the picnic bench is really me, and that guy should be walking home any minute now.
Jordan’s columns run biweekly Mondays. She can be reached at j.hart@cavalierdaily.com.
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