Sex and the small town campus: A 2013 graduate reflects

Orientation: On the house: the College House affiliate experience

“So are there fraternities at Bowdoin?” Get ready—people are going to ask you this question over and over during the next four years, and probably long after. There is no Greek life at Bowdoin, and the student handbook explicitly prohibits fraternities and sororities. Bowdoin phased out its co-ed fraternities in the 1990s and the College Houses (or, as they’re more commonly called, social houses) were instituted to replace the Greek system.
There are eight social houses on campus—Ladd, Baxter, Reed, Macmillan (“Mac”), Quinby, Helmreich, Burnett and Howell—and they are primarily inhabited by sophomores.
After much discussion and deliberation, the Office of Residential Life has instituted some substantial changes for the College House system this year. In the new system, each floor of a first year brick is affiliated with a different College House; your friends on the floor below you will be affiliates of a different House and your fellow affiliates will all live in different dorms. (Refer to the inset for a full list of floor and House affiliations.)

Orientation

Sex and the small town campus: A 2013 graduate reflects

September 9, 2013

When I was asked to write an article about what to expect from the Bowdoin hookup and dating scene, my first thought was: “I’ve finally made it—I am Carrie Bradshaw.” My second thought was that there’s no way to give universal advice on this subject when everyone has such diverse sex (or-lack-thereof) lives at Bowdoin.

So I put on my thinking cap and set about unraveling Bowdoin’s proverbial sex-and-relationship sweater to find the common threads.

There are certain inevitabilities that come with the Bowdoin hookup scene.

Will your friends take photos of you while you make out with your dreamy senior crush at Pinefest? Probably.

Will you wave at your calculus professor’s children on the Quad as you walk back to your dorm on Sunday morning, still wearing your toga from Epicuria? Who hasn’t.

Will you miss the entirety of the Ivies concert because you hopped the fence to hook up with a charming young gentleman in a random unlocked Pine Street apartment instead? I’m not going to say it’s unlikely.

Will you spend a romantic evening getting naked with a townie in a storage closet in Harpswell apartments?

Oh, we’ve all been there.

At this point you might be wondering what golden nuggets of advice could possibly be hidden amongst such Shakespearean-quality love stories. The first is that if you take hooking up and dating at Bowdoin too seriously, you’ll make things pretty awkward for yourself. If you can’t have a good laugh about your most recent foray into the widespread mating ritual that is Saturday night at Bowdoin College over brunch the next morning, you will likely be quite miserable.

Second: no matter how outrageous and objectively mortifying the situation you find yourself in, you are probably neither the first nor the last to be there. Or at the very least, someone has definitely done weirder—probably in the same bed! And that is a comforting thing to keep in mind as you inevitably discover that everyone from your roommate to your proctor’s mother’s gynecologist will hear about your escapades.

Third: Bowdoin is a one-of-a-kind bubble of awkwardness. It is a place where you are basically guaranteed to run into your crush while housing nachos at Super Snack when you haven’t showered in four days. A place where it is statistically unlikely that you and your best pals have not made out with at least three of the same people. A place where your friends will joke about that one time that you hooked up with your first-year floormate literally until the day you graduate. There’s no real advice to be given here, but you may as well acknowledge these inevitabilities now and save yourself some time.

It is also important to realize that there will come times when it feels like all of your friends are in happy relationships with the perfect balance of meaningful mutual interests and awesome sex, while you are the only one still looking for love in Baxter basement. But as you crank Bon Iver and sob into a care package from your parents, remember that this is simply never the case.

And chances are, some of your wifed-up friends are jealous of the fact that you can go out there on a Friday night and rub your crotch all over whatever inviting crotch comes your way on the dance floor. You lucky duck, you.

A final inevitability of the tour de romance at Bowdoin is that people will complain about it. A lot. You will spend hours grumbling about the dating or lack of dating scene at Bowdoin. But if you don’t like how things are going in your love life here, change how you are doing things.

If you are looking for that special someone, don’t go to Crack House every weekend night and then complain that none of the blackout randos there will take you to Scarlet Begonias. If you want to have some fun, non-committal dance floor make outs, don’t hang out with your roommates every night and then say that there’s no way to meet new people. It’s not rocket science, but it is also easy to get stuck in a rut. There is no cure-all—you will still face plenty of heartbreak and disappointment. But that’s not a Bowdoin problem, that’s just life.

And if all else fails, just consult Cosmopolitan magazine and do the exact opposite of whatever it suggests.

Now go get ’em, bears.

Tessa Kramer is a member of the Class of 2013.

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