Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.
I think we are all lonely.
Parties happen every week and people hook up with different people almost every week. It’s a small school – you can only ‘conquer’ more territory so far.
I enjoy going to parties. I love dancing with my friends and enjoying the music. I am from Japan and I honestly did not have a lot of experience with parties. Sure, I went to an after party at a Model UN conference, but that was the only party I had gone to before coming to America. It did not help that I had gone to an all-girls school for six years of my precious teen partying years. But I thought I had seen enough of Mean Girls and 21 Jump Street to know what parties are like.
Wrong. Coming here, I realize that I knew nothing about partying. Not knowing the array of drinking games and not knowing what was a pregame were only some of the things I was unexposed to. I was even more clueless about the hookup culture.
Why do so many people hook up? I know friends who have slept in the rooms of random people only to awkwardly avoid them at Sharples the next morning.
I think a lot of us are all very lonely, not just horny. Seeing freshmen acting like hormone-crazed primates, I cannot help but think that we are all really lonely. We are away from home, from our family and our friends; we have left so many things that we care about. We are, as Violence Prevention Educator and Advocate Nina Harris has said, “We are skin hungry.” We want to feel physically close to people.
This also leads me to contemplate how superficial relationships can be. Physical interaction was supposed to mean something, but here at college, it is just something you do on a whim. Maybe I am old-fashioned, maybe I am naive. But what happened to the relationships that are actually founded on communication?
It may be true that people are not hooking up with the intent of going into a relationship. But I think they want to feel wanted by someone. Our family and friends back home were part of our identity and made a great part of how we perceive ourselves. Many of us were fortunate enough to feel loved and wanted. However, now we are in an alien place with new people, struggling to find our own identities and the meaning of our existence.
We are lonely and want to hook up with people. Or maybe I am just wrong, and everyone is just horny.
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