People often see college as the perfect opportunity to enter the dating scene, but finding your soulmate can feel like finding a needle in a haystack — if they’re even there in the first place.
Many undergraduate students rush into relationships due to social pressure and the fear of missing romantic opportunities — they simply like the idea of changing their status from “single” to “taken.”
“People’s choices about whether to match with a particular target were not calibrated to their romantic standards and ideals,” according to speed-dating studies on undergraduate students in the National Library of Medicine.
Instead of a compatible partner, eager young romantics often pick a person from the bunch and shoehorn them into their ideal picture of “the one.”
Emma Darbro, senior in LAS, teaches FYCARE, a mandatory workshop to help educate first-year students about consent and relationships. She shared that FYCARE emphasizes building healthy relationships and encourages students to explore their preferences and interests through other means, like RSOs.
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“I think that college is the time for exploration,” Darbro said. “You’re surrounded by a lot of people with a lot of different perspectives, backgrounds and interests.”
Darbro also works in a healthy relationship lab in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies. The lab focuses on why people start and stop dating, how relationships change over time and how different factors impact relationships.
Her lab work affects how she approaches the pressure students face in the college dating scene.
“Someone once told me that if we are to believe in this premise of there being one right person or ‘soulmate’ for us, they are, statistically speaking, probably not in Champaign,” Darbro said.
Dating apps open the gates to finding partners within a certain distance. There are options galore for anyone determined to comb through the cornfields for their soulmate. Hopefully, their soulmate is also on dating apps.
The results of a 2021 NLM research study survey conducted in the United States underlined the influence of dating apps in modern-day dating culture.
While people associate dating apps with casual sex, students often meet their matches with love as a top motive, pushing the narrative that college students are eager for serious relationships.
Social media tends to coerce students into long-term relationships, even when they are not ready.
According to a Pew Research Center study, approximately 33% of “single and looking” social media users claim that seeing posts about the dating lives of others makes them feel worse about their own.
Lately, it seems like there’s a stronger emphasis on having earlier life experiences, such as having your first kiss before college. Therefore, students may feel they must build up an arsenal of experience before even arriving on campus.
That “must-have” element of college is just a myth. College offers way more than a thriving dating scene. It also provides opportunities — like the thousand-plus RSOs at the University — for students to explore their identity and interests.
“If you’re going to date, it should be fun, and it should be easy,” Darbro said. “It doesn’t just have to be about finding a partner; it can also just be about meeting new people.”
