At some point in eighth week, with clothes strewn across my half-empty suitcase and my Hum paper nowhere near finished, I came across this fun fact on the Wikipedia page of the College: nearly 50 percent of UChicago students end up marrying each other. As someone who has spent far too much time internalizing the aesthetics of glossy ’80s rom-coms and predictable tropes from badly written teen dramas, I was intrigued. Although the Wikipedia page also notes that this “fact” is merely a fabrication, it raises the question of finding love at UChicago. With the arrival of cuffing season, I propose that we take the time to find a different kind of love in our life: not the kind crafted by social media or found in recycled narratives from Hollywood executives, but non-romantic love in places more familiar than we think.

These new avenues might just be what we need in a time where love and connection feel out of reach

This isn’t just a symptom seen in the UChicago student body, either: Gen Z has abandoned orthodox ideas of love and readily embraced an era where young people are too busy being careerists to worry about their love lives. With our stacked, color-coded Google Calendars and mounting pressures from school and work, romance is often left out of the equation. Not surprisingly, the advent of social media has skewed our expectations of finding connection as well. We romanticize relationships that have been filtered and cropped, glamorize performative gestures while cringing at genuine ones, and receive transactions of validation through likes and Tinder swipes. The cultural norm has shifted to adjust to this age of opting for efficiency and surface-level connection, and as a consequence, it’s possible that we’ve lost touch of the idea of love at its core. (more…)