Sleeping Around: Pre-dating

Introducing Sleeping Around: a commentary on sex, love and relationships in college.  That’s right, The Bucknellian is getting ballsy and printing the things you want to read.  Each week, we will print a provocative column commenting on, making fun of and sometimes even embarrassing students and their sex lives.  Can you handle it?

Students on this campus are some of the horniest people around.  Lilly Pulitzer day planners should just be manufactured with stickers labeled “Become intoxicated and copulate with a stranger” so we can schedule our drunken sexual encounters around midterm week.

This hookup culture promotes a lack of definition for what happens when your one-night stands dwindle down to a single repeat offender.

Now that we’re supposed to be independent, strong-willed women, why are we still allowing men to dictate when we’re going to date and when we’re going to fornicate?

It seems we female college students allow the males to force us into a culture that promotes the following relationship buildup:

1.  Meet at party.

2.  Dance.  Make out.  Exchange phone numbers (sometimes only BBMs, since numbers could allow more than text communication and we’re uncomfortable with any serious sober contact).

3.  One week or so later, drunk text and meet up at some party with a theme titled “Refugees and Rescuees.”  (Total bullshit. In reality, the theme is slutty nurses with bros ogling their goodies.)

4.  Play a few rounds of beer pong, chandelier or flip cup and abruptly leave for what is known as the “house,” aka all things “frat”.

5.  Repeat for two to four months.

6.  Have “the talk” and change your Facebook relationship status so your mother can think you’re not just an easy whore, but trying to form a “real connection” with the guy you feel pressured into taking to your formals at the end of the semester.  (Let’s be honest though—you need to be plastered to make it through that shit.)

Once we’ve hit this point (where we’re taking a hookup to formals but still refusing to acknowledge his existence outside the hours of 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights), I propose we as women take control of our lives and begin using the term “pre-dating.”

Pre-dating (n.): the relationship state prior to that of being in a relationship but after that of casually hooking up. 

“So what’s going on with you and Mike? I know you two have been sleeping together for a while.”

“Oh, we’re pre-dating, you know, more than hooking up, but it’s not like he’ll be meeting the parents anytime soon.”

Now that we are independent, strong-willed women, it’s our turn to dictate the dating vs. having sex relationship.  It’s time for us to define where our relationships are headed and let our partners know we won’t take their bullshit lying down.

Have ideas for Sleeping Around topics?  Email BucknellianSleepingAround@gmail.com. All submissions are for the columnist’s eyes only.