Regardless of whether or not they’re still together, a good amount of our generation’s parents met in college. Few and far between are stories of middle school and high school sweethearts taking the perilous plunge into matrimony, yet we often hear tales of meeting future lovers on ‘the college steps’.
I decided to take a few moments out of my usual schedule of pop-culture conversation, sipping on Diet Pepsi, pretending to be cool, and generally avoiding thoughts about the future to reflect on my prospects for finding a mate, and to use this column as a pulpit from which to pontificate about the complexity of that crazy feeling known as ‘love’.
Speaking in all honesty, I don’t think I’ve ever really ‘loved’ anybody romantically. High school was an endless stream of short-term relationships that almost always ended up with a tear-soaked phone conversation or a slow fizzle into inevitable ‘friendship’.
Love in those days was much like a firecracker, loud and heated, but over way too fast (in more ways than one). Never once did I entertain thoughts like ‘marriage’, ‘children’, ‘mortgage’, or ‘joint bank accounts’.
The largest problem my fair maidens and I had was usually deciding on what flick we would go see at the local theatre. But as the collegiate lifestyle has slowly taken me over, I can’t help but think about something more serious.
Is this crunch-time for finding true love? If I fail to find the right dame flouncing about ETSU, will I end up being a sad, lonely old man with nothing to do but follow kids around at the local shopping mall or hole up in my shack watching endless re-runs of “The Price Is Right”, wondering just what the hell went wrong?
Like a curious boy in a closet full of his brother’s dirty magazines, I had to do some hands-on investigation for myself. In doing so, I will re-trace the steps of my last three dates, and decide if any of them had a snowball’s chance in hell of ending up being anything worthwhile.
Note: The names of the following ladies have been changed to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent alike.
Date Number One: Little Miss Make-up
I went out with a girl one night in late-August. We’ll call her ‘Karen’. She was an absolutely gorgeous gal with long brown hair that smelled like the freakin’ sea breeze, big blue eyes, and a slender, lovely body that reminded me of a poor man’s Audrey Hepburn.
Being the unoriginal bag of douche that I am, I decided to take her to my place for a movie followed by Starbucks. I figured that the film would give us something to talk about, and Starbucks, in turn, would give us a place to talk about it.
Little did I know when I picked her up that I was about to go toe-to-toe with someone roughly as intellectually gifted and conversationally adept as a cocker spaniel on sedatives.
After picking Karen up, we bee-lined it to the local Blockbuster video, where the first of many clashes of taste was to take place. I was pacing slowly, looking at Martin Scorsese movies and Tarantino flicks (probably not the best idea in retrospect) while she searched for anything with Ryan Gosling or Paul Walker on the cover.
It seemed that Karen had her heart set on “The Notebook”, and who was I to question such a sound choice? So alas, I wasted five bucks on that abomination of film, not to mention my entire evening.
As we entered the darkened room that would serve as our theatre, it became apparent that Karen wasn’t very much interested in seeing the film that she’d so violently argued for at Blockbuster. Instead, she wanted to take these two hours of craptastic cinema and use them as an opportunity to take advantage of my strapping young body.
I had to draw the proverbial line in the sand right then and there. She was making a great many physical advances, and was quite obviously speeding up what is considered proper dating etiquette. “But don’t you want to?” she pleaded. She began rubbing up against me in much the same fashion as a cat rubs a scratching post, and I’d had enough of Karen, despite her good looks. I suddenly felt some sort of residue on my neck region during her repeated come-ons! I promptly stood up, walked to the light switch, and flipped it on.
I discovered that Karen had been wearing a bit too much make-up, as evidenced by the fact that my once-white shirt was now ‘Maybelline Bronze’.
No apology was offered to me by Karen, that she-devil. We just sat in awkward silence and watched Gosling and McAdams make out in the rain.
The screen in front of me made true love seem so close, but the make-up soaked Jezebel to my right made it seem so far away.
I was truly a man conflicted. Starbucks wasn’t in the cards for date number one, which ended with a half-hug that resembled the way in which rappers hug when saying goodbye to their ‘posse’.
My date with Karen was officially a disaster, my love life seemed to be stuck in neutral, and I couldn’t help but feel like finding love in college was going to be something like a gun fight, a gun fight I’d only brought a rusty switchblade to.
TO BE CONTINUED .

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