The Bucknellian

Justin Marinelli
Staff Writer

One of the most annoying moral dilemmas is when you have the opportunity to hook up with a friend’s ex. On one hand, the urge to satisfy your animalistic desires runs strong. On the other, you don’t want to induce any possible tension between you and your friend (even if you think that what you do is none of your friend’s business).

Granted, some rules exist to help you navigate such a situation, but relying on phrases like “bros before hoes” hardly provides a solution to all situations you could find yourself in. What we need is a definite line to be drawn that cannot be crossed. Allow me to set that line.

Many would consider a time limit to be a reasonable thing to gauge appropriateness of the situation. After all, getting into a relationship with a friend’s ex two years later is far more reasonable than waiting two weeks, right? I disagree. Time isn’t the issue; it’s whether your friend is over the person you’re interested in or not.

More specifically, whether your friend is over their ex dictates exactly what action you can take. If they’re really over their ex, there’s no problem whatsoever, even if it’s just been a day or so since the break-up. If they aren’t, things get tricky. Most people would argue that pursuing someone at such a time is a completely unacceptable action. I’m a bit more lenient in my view. While many consider it a mark of disrespect for your friend to date or hook up with their ex, especially if he or she isn’t over them, there is no good reason for this to be so. Still, you want to keep your friend happy, so it makes perfect sense to not let him or her find out if you’re doing anything behind their back.

Am I condoning going behind your friend’s back to get with their ex? Only if you don’t let them find out about it. It’s none of your friend’s business what you decide to do with another person, but if your friend would be hurt by your actions, then it would be a good idea to be discreet. No need to upset him or her needlessly.

Now, would it be more ethical to completely avoid dating or hooking any of your friends’ exes? Absolutely. However, what is acceptable doesn’t have to be the height of morality. As they say, all’s fair in love in war.

El McCabe
Writer

Negativity is a popular theme in society today. Everywhere you turn, there are news stories about traumatic events, natural disasters and even which celebrity couple recently split. For some reason, negative stories catch people’s attention, sell magazines and newspapers, and fill up time on news blocks. However, what publishing, campaigning and other companies fail to realize is that constantly immersing yourself in negativity has dangerous potential to trickle down into all aspects of your life, such as social and political involvement.

This preoccupation with negativity is a salient issue this year with the November election quickly approaching. Election strategies over the last few decades have been centered on “digging up dirt” on the opponent rather than on the actual issues–a fact turning many voters away from the polls altogether. For example, if a candidate is caught having an affair, many voters who do not respect cheaters will change their votes to his opponent or decide not to vote at all. Candidates are human beings that make mistakes like everyone else, and going back and forth ragging on one another will only create negative perceptions about the political process and voting.

Politics and the election process should be about choosing the candidate that is going to look out for the best interests of the people, not about who has the cleanest record. Just because a presidential candidate has made mistakes in his/her personal life, does not mean that he or she would make a bad president. Likewise, those with clean records may have just gotten lucky and not been caught, and due to these variables I firmly believe that the private spheres and public spheres of these candidates’ lives should be kept separate.

Unfortunately, negative publicity has already started turning the tide of the election this year and has swayed the opinions of many voters. During the process of choosing the Republican candidate for the 2012 election, many of the prospective candidates turned against each other to win the primary. This forced Republicans to choose the “least worst” of the candidates in the negative light they were portrayed in and has caused many Republicans to dislike all the options for the presidency.

Now, although it is inevitable that these politicians will continue to duke it out until November, we as voters still have the power and time to change the outcome of the election. Choosing a president blindly and out of bias will only hurt our country in the end, and we need to look past the negative. I understand it may be difficult to avoid feeling hopeless with so much negativity everywhere, but it is crucial to remember that no one is perfect and to vote along the lines of who will improve society.

Justin Marinelli
Staff Writer

We live in the most connected and communicative time in history. We have the capability to communicate with essentially anyone we’ve met across the course of our lives. Why don’t we? Remember your high school graduation, when you totally told all of your friends that you’d stay in touch? If you don’t remember, trust me, you did. How many do you actually keep in touch with?

I certainly remember believing I’d keep in touch with my high school friends a lot more than I’ve ended up doing. It actually fascinates me that this happened. I suppose somewhere along the line I got caught up in my new life at college, and it took me until now to do some introspection.

At any moment, I could get on Facebook and send a message to essentially any of my high school friends that I promised to stay in contact with. Yet, I don’t. I keep in touch with only about two or three of my old friends. Not because those were the only people I really cared about, but just because that’s how things ended up.

At the end of the day, a fair number of my friendships have faded because of a lack of contact, but not all of them have suffered that fate. While most friendships will get weaker with a lack of contact, some connections run too deep to fade. While this isn’t true for the overwhelming majority of friendships (I can count on only one hand how many people I have this relationship with), those few I have would have carried on just the same, even if we didn’t have the option to keep in touch through technological means.

In a way, I suppose you could say not keeping in touch is the best way to find out who you really feel a close connection with. Still, applying acid tests like this to find out this information is a bit of a harsh way to treat your friends. At the end of the day, fostering relationships takes work, even if it’s just a relationship between two friends. We have the opportunities and the tools we need to keep in touch with old friends. It would be quite a shame not to use them. Here’s my challenge to you this week: get in touch with an old friend you haven’t talked to in years this weekend. Catch up, rekindle the friendship and remember how things used to be. I know I’ll be doing that.

Ginny Jacobs
Contributing Writer

You don’t have to be on campus for very long to know about the unusually large number of University students who marry each other. As a group, we boast about this high percentage, as well as at least consider the option of joining the four-year-long wait list to be married in Rooke Chapel. However, similar to just about any college, if you go ask the average student about the campus dating scene, the most common answer you will get is, “What dating scene?” Few people are actually in relationships and the notion of going on an actual date is outdated. The word “dating” is not in the vocabulary of many college students. It seems like a relic from the college days of our parents, almost on par with words on the verge of extinction like “pinning” or “going steady.” For most students, the formal date has been replaced by friendship, the one (or multiple) night stand or serious relationship.

One recent study indicated that most of today’s college students are not dating in the traditional sense. Instead, they are either engaging in casual sex or in serious relationships, with almost nothing in between. Dating on college campuses has been replaced by what’s commonly called “hooking up,” according to a recent nationwide study of more than 1,000 college women by the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF). Respondents define the term this way: “a girl and a guy get together for a physical encounter and don’t necessarily expect anything further.”

Why have we as a collective group switched from the conventional dating style over to this new “hook-up culture?” Kerry Cronin, a professor of philosophy at Boston College, recently gave a talk to students on this very subject and why we are no longer dating. She says she got into this topic about seven or eight years ago when talking with graduating seniors about the things they felt like they missed out on. From this, she found that a large portion of students had never gone out on an actual date throughout their college careers and regretted it. Cronin claimed she detected a sense of both, “wistfulness and anxiety among the students over the thought of graduating without having developed the basic social courage to go on a date.”

Cronin went on to argue that the hook up culture is a shortcut to fitting in socially, to having social status. We all want to tell a story at weekend brunch, where the stories are usually about who hooked up with whom, and hooking up is a way to do that. Feeling a part of something is an incredibly important part of college life. Going in and out of this hook up scene is usually motivated largely by a desire for connection, but this desire is often obstructed by a lack of courage. The difficult thing is having the simple courage to ask somebody if he or she would want to sit down for an hour and talk.

Additionally, most University students have a very limited amount of time to spend on any social activities. Most do not want to put the time or emotional effort into a committed relationship while still in college, and feel the need to concentrate on future goals. Dating is only further complicated by ambiguous language such as just talking, hooking up, friends with benefits and open-relationships, all terms used to avoid the dreaded concept of commitment. These semi-relationships relieve some of the pressure of a real relationship by allowing both people involved to leave their options open.

But who wants to graduate from college with an armload of “open options,” but no beautiful memories? Maybe it is time for our generation to rethink dating. College is the time when we are supposed to move beyond our comfort zones and acquire a variety of experiences. So why not, just one time before you cross the stage on the quad, try something truly exotic and frightening and go out on a real date?

Caroline Schaeffer
Writer

There comes a time in your college life when you realize you have a staggering amount of work to do and almost no time to complete it. Desperately, you seek out the library in an attempt to get some peace and quiet. Unfortunately, before you even make the slightest dent in your staggering workload, you realize that between the guy sitting next to you loudly discussing his weekend plans and the music junkie blasting Pitbull straight through his headphones, you’re not going to get much work done there at all. Why is it that sometimes even the library is too loud to get anything done? Are people that out of tune with those around them to be considerate of people actually trying to study? Sadly, this lack of consideration seems to be all too common of an occurrence as of late. People think less about those around them and more about their own personal needs.

Of course it would be impractical to expect people to remain completely silent at all times while in the library. After all, there are already specific silent zones for students in need of that level of concentration. But just because a certain area isn’t labeled a “quiet” zone, doesn’t mean it’s okay to talk as loudly and freely as you would in Bostwick Marketplace. No part of the library is truly meant to be the social epicenter of campus and, more often than not, people in the library are there for a reason. To loudly joke with your friends about that funny thing your roommate said yesterday is not only distracting, it’s a little rude.

The problem is that most people aren’t thinking about the guy studying for a bio exam next to them or the girl practicing Spanish two tables over; they’re only thinking about themselves. Most people are more focused on what they and their immediate friends want and are less concerned with the people around them who may actually be doing work. Everyone is guilty of this to some degree (I can’t say I’ve never been a little louder than I should in the library), but all it would take is some common courtesy to correct this problem. For some, a gesture as small as lowering your voice could greatly improve the experience of those around you actually doing work. There are many other great places to socialize with friends on campus besides the library, and a lot of them would welcome all different levels of noise.

By no means should the library turn into a place devoid of all sound and activity–that would be depressing. Instead, students just need to be aware of people around them, and remember that the next time they have to study for a colossal exam, they’d be pretty thankful to have a relatively distraction-free place to cram for their test.