Love, Sex, and Dating at the RUG

The ‘meet cute’. You know how it goes: two strangers with unusually good hair bump into each other in the grocery store. He drops his well-worn copy of To the Lighthouse; they both reach for it; their fingers touch; the angels sing. It’s love.

‘Deep down, I think everyone wants that supermarket moment’, says German journalism masters student, Valeska Schietinger. Another student on the popular RUG Confessions Facebook page even admits to trying to orchestrate her own meet cute: ‘I choose my grocery store based on the hottest boys.’

Do people want to use Tinder? No; God no. It’s a necessary evil’

But dating culture at the RUG is less about serendipity, students say, and more about swiping right. According to an UKrant instagram quiz, only half of the romantic connections people make happen in real life; the rest happen through dating apps.

‘Do people want to use Tinder? No; God no. But it’s a necessary evil’, says 24-year-old British masters student Benjie Beer.

Awkward

Students use Tinder for a lot of reasons. The biggest? Avoiding awkwardness. First-year psychology student, Emma, says it would be crazy uncomfortable to date actual classmates. ‘Save that for Tinder. While lectures are large, classes are small. If you have bad sex with someone in your class, you’re stuck in there with them for the rest of the year. That’s gonna be awful.’

And offline flirting is hard; there are no rules and everyone is confused. ‘It’s the Wild West of dating out here’, complains one student in line at the UB Starbucks, who confesses that she stayed up late trying to match with her cute TA on Tinder.

‘Right? How do people meet? I wish I knew!’ groans an international PhD at the UMCG. ‘I had a crush on a guy in my department and my friends had to push me for two weeks just to say “hi” to him. It was so nerve-wracking!’

Benjie is no stranger to the awkwardness of real-word attempts at flirting, either. He recalls a time he found himself sitting only one seat away from a cute girl in the library – what luck! He cooked up a scheme to talk to her. ‘I bought a Twix at a vending machine. I sat down and ate half. Then I turned to her and stuttered, “D-d’you want the other half?”‘, he laughs.

‘Of course she said no. Well, I wasn’t going to eat it. So it just lay there between us, a symbol of my frustrated sexuality.’

Misunderstandings

Students also use Tinder to avoid misunderstandings. Benjie says people are more aware of the thin line between romance and creepiness in the wake of #MeToo. ‘If I would think twice about approaching someone in the past, I would think three times now. People might interpret my interest as male domination of space’, he shrugs.

Who wants to be that douchebag? ‘Maybe I’m a cynical bastard, but if someone asked me out randomly in a bookstore or something, even I might be annoyed. I’m shopping for a book, not a date.’

Even when you are bold enough to flirt outright, signals can still get crossed. Emma, who is bisexual, says flirting with other women is especially tricky. ‘Bisexual and lesbian women are very oblivious to the sexual interest of other women’, she sighs.

It’s pretty safe to assume that anyone I meet offline is going to be straight

‘We have this culture that normalises a sort of sexual affection in female friendships. Straight girls are like, “Oh my God, you’re so HOT”, and their friends are like, “Awww, I love you”. So how do I make it clear: no, literally, I love you?’ she jokes.

‘Even if I’m on a date with a woman and something sexual happens, we can still walk away wondering, “but wait, are we just friends?”‘

Guesswork

Third-year Indian student Kshitij Mor – ‘pronounced like “quidditch” but with a “sh“‘ – agrees: it seems like Tinder and Grindr are the only sure way for him to meet someone who will return his interest. ‘I’m gay, and it’s pretty safe to assume that anyone I meet offline is going to be straight. The risk of approaching – and offending – someone is too high.’

Dating apps take confusion out of the equation. On Tinder, there’s a mutual agreement to judge and be judged superficially. And if you match with someone, the guesswork of gauging their interest disappears.

‘Apps definitely make it easier to avoid the risk of rejection or humiliation that comes with meeting someone in real life’, says Ben Shaffrey, a second-year AI student from Ireland. ‘You don’t have to go through so much trial and error.’

But is that true for everyone?

Wasted time

For RUG women, Tinder dates are often just hours of their lives they won’t ever get back. Valeska signed up for Tinder as an experiment for a journalism project. ‘Ugh, I hated it’, she groans, ‘you just meet strangers. It’s horrible.’ She had what she thought were really nice Whatsapp conversations with Tinder matches only to discover that the guys were duds in person. ‘It can be immediate: dude, no, this isn’t going anywhere’, she shrugs. ‘That’s a lot of time wasted.’

How do people meet? I wish I knew!

And thanks to filters, facetune, and carefully calculated selfie angles, light catfishing has become a dating-app norm. Among her friends, it’s a common complaint that guys don’t look anything like their pictures. ‘That’s totally true, you never actually know what’s real’, Tatenda agrees.

In person, people tend to be just a disappointing approximation of their online selves. After all, you can’t curate reality. Tatenda points out that online you can calculate the effect of every word; you can wait two days to respond; you can ‘screenshot a message from a match and put it in a group chat’ to crowdsource a witty response. ‘In my experience, a guy can be really talkative and interesting online, but in person I watch him struggle to think of something to say.’

Still: a string of bad dates doesn’t a Tinder-deterrent make. Somewhere in all those duds there must be a diamond; Tatenda met her most recent ex on Tinder. ‘Tinder gives you a really strong impression that you have unlimited options, so you just keep swiping and swiping’, she says. ‘You don’t want to miss anything. For every female student, there are just so many guys.’

Not for everyone

And then there is the ‘other half’: RUG students who aren’t on Tinder. Tatenda suspects that they aren’t on the app because they secretly want the ‘meet cute’.

But Indonesian PhD student Tyas Dyah says she doesn’t avoid Tinder because she is some kind of hopeless romantic or dating purist. She says it’s just too hard to date in Groningen as a Muslim woman. Even though dating is totally normal for Muslims in Indonesia, ‘for whatever reason, people here think that women in hijab can’t date or like, even touch a man. And since dating apps are mostly for hookups, people would think it was extra weird to see an obviously Muslim woman on Tinder.’

Dating is just too much of a hassle

Tyas has largely given up meeting someone at the RUG because deconstructing other people’s ideas about her beliefs and choices is too much work. ‘Between my culture and my religion, dating is just too much of a hassle – there is so much explanation that has to happen first.’

Other students find themselves outside the student dating culture for other reasons. Philosophy student Lucas Kuipers – who is thoughtful, soft-spoken, and funny – says that the Tinder approach just isn’t a match for his personality. ‘I recently got an autism diagnosis’, he says, ‘and while it makes sense of a lot of things about me, it can also make dating really hard. The idea of meeting someone out of the blue is really foreign to me.’

Lucas likes to know everything he can about whatever he decides to invest in. But today’s approach to dating seems to hinge almost exclusively on superficial connections. ‘It’s not really normal anymore to get to know someone well before you ask them out. The app comes first. It’s kind of messed up.’

Holding out for love

Even though the Tinder generation has mostly given up on a Hollywood ‘meet cute’, it seems the majority of RUG students are still holding out for love. 66 percent of the respondents to our Instagram quiz say that they want to find romance at the university.

It’s evolutionary: you make eye contact, you smile, you walk over and introduce yourself.

‘People still want that traditional real life meeting they can tell their friends about – you know, in a club, at a cafe, at the library’, says Tatenda. ‘And while it may not be Hollywood-cute, it still happens. Even if your life becomes super digitalised, that kind of human interaction isn’t gonna change; it’s evolutionary: you make eye contact, you smile, you walk over and introduce yourself.’

In the week leading up to Valentine’s day, only 25 percent of respondents who have dating apps have used them at all. Perhaps during the most romantic week of the year, students are more inclined to get offline and meet people the old fashioned way.

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