Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan: Ambiguity inherent in college relationships

Sometimes, you've gotta miss sixth grade.

Times were good back then. Calculus was years away, Little League was in full swing and you still got to wear jeans to school dances. And romance was simple: either you were going out with that saucy classmate in fetching braces or you weren't. He was your Boyfriend, she was your Girlfriend, and it was a flurry of hand-holding and love notes until your breakup provided grist for the junior high rumor mill two weeks later. Clear, understandable and readily apparent to all, our relationships were black and white, either/or, on or off.

Then, we grew up and came to college, complicating the hell out of our love lives somewhere along the way. No longer do these clearly delineated relationships suffice -- instead, we keep everything so ambiguous that no one can quite figure out what's going on between any given pair, including the lovebirds themselves.

If there ever were any rules for dating, our generation has thrown most of them out and scrambled the rest into an indecipherable jumble. It's gotten to the point where the classifications of Boyfriend/Girlfriend and Not Boyfriend/Girlfriend don't cut it because there are a hundred different variations between the two.

There's the guy you hook up with occasionally when you bump into him at a party. There's that girl friend who's sometimes more than a friend, but not always. There's the guy who took you out to Center City for dinner a few times and kissed you goodnight on the cheek once. There's the girl you're sorta regularly sleeping with only to discover that you're not the only dish on the menu, so to speak. And there are countless nuances between even those, each with its own unique situation. Nobody bats an eye anymore, but that doesn't mean we aren't staying up at night wondering how to introduce Mr./Ms. Whatever to our friends.

This pervasive ambiguity isn't a bad thing in itself. The absence of strict rules of romantic conduct allows for a whole lot more freedom: rather than being locked into a restrictive social script for behavior, we can decide just how we feel about a potential partner and act accordingly. The traditional scenario of falling in love and spending every moment together is still fine, if that's what makes you both happy -- but for those who share an attraction but wouldn't exactly bring each other home to meet Mom, flings are OK, too.

But the problem with all this freedom is that it's awfully confusing. At least when you're in a conventional relationship, you know what to expect of your partner. There are certain things Boyfriends/Girlfriends do for each other: you know, flowers, birthday presents, regular Saturday night dates, a shoulder to cry on and front-row attendance at all of your a cappella concerts. But when your love life is mired in an undefined no man's land, how exactly do you act?

Should you expect the guy you only see after dark in one of your bedrooms to listen when you get in a fight with your mom? Do you have to invite that friend-who's-sometimes-more to your semiformal? Are you allowed to get mad if the one you're kinda dating, sort of, hooks up with someone else? In a world where holding hands in public can be more intimate than sex, there's no clear way to tell.

So we wander rather clumsily through the hazy landscape of lust, love and romance, hurting each other in the process. When a couple can't agree on the definition of their relationship beyond "we have a thing," one person usually expects more than the other. And of course, when one person thinks he's found the One and the other is just having some fun, they're bound for resentment, tears or a messy confrontation. We think we're bypassing the good old-fashioned heartaches of love by keeping things vague and casual, but sometimes our conscious rule-breaking backfires.

In a perfect world, this would work because we would all be honest and direct. At some point early on in the "thing," whether it's a marriage-to-be or a one-night stand, each person could just lay it on the line: From "I'm crazy about you and you must be mine" to "I'm just looking to blow off some steam tonight," at least we'd know where we stood. People would still get hurt and feelings would still change, but we would have a better idea of how to relate to each other. Expectations would be clearer, behavior would be more obvious, and we'd know what to say when our friends ask exactly what's going on with what's-his-name.

Just like in good old sixth grade.

Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan is a senior communications major from Wheaton, Ill. Six Feet One appears on Tuesdays.

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