Category: Columns

By Stacey Lace

Columnist

“In every breakup, there are winners and losers.” –Marshall Eriksen, “How I Met Your Mother”

While this seems awful, we should all realize that Marshall isn’t so far off.  On television and in real life, winning the breakup is never something to joke about.  It’s a serious competition, and only the strong survive.

According to UrbanDictionary.com, winning the breakup means “meeting your ex after some time has passed and comparing details about your current lives–-there is always a winner and a loser in a breakup.  If your life is going significantly better than your ex’s, then you win the breakup.”

From this definition, you can realize how paramount it is to be the winner rather than the loser.  While you know you’re the hotter commodity, you need to prove it.

Let’s examine some battle tactics used in these breakup wars:

– Facebook relationship statuses:  It’s great being able to creep all over your ex’s page, but maybe obsessing about the fact that he or she still hasn’t removed the “in a relationship” isn’t worth your time.

– Facebook photos:  You and I both know that constantly going through old photos of the two of you isn’t healthy.  It’s also probably not healthy to see a picture of your ex with someone new (untagged), and then spend hours with your friends trying to identify said untagged person.

– Costumes:  Whether it be Halloween or a themed register, it’s very important in the breakup battle that anytime you dress up, you take a high number of photos of you looking great and having a great time.

– Campus sightings:  To win a breakup, you have to be on your A-game all the time, including when you eat or even check your mail.  You have to make sure that if spotted, you’re the one who couldn’t possibly tear yourself away from your friends because you’re all laughing too hard from your witty comments.  This is the only face time you have to unequivocally prove that you are better off.

My question is whether this competition is even worth it.  Once you’ve won a few battles and maybe even the war, do you feel better?  I don’t think it helps us to move on, but rather creates an unhealthy obsession with the past.  It seems that the effort we put into the contest is really just a distraction from moving on with the rest of our lives.

Have ideas for Sleeping Around topics?  We invite you to send in things you want to read about as well as personal anecdotes.  Email BucknellianSleepingAround@gmail.com. All submissions are for the columnist’s eyes only.

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.