Columnist Francesco Salamone claims that the "college sorting machine" results in romantic relationships with too-similar partners.
Credit: Priscilla des GachonsPenn provides an exclusive education, exclusive faculty, and exclusive jobs, but less is said about its exclusive dating pool. We could say elite colleges are arranged matchmaking services. Around twenty eight percent of you will marry a Penn partner (researchers believe, anyway). How lovely? As avid regret minimizers, let me ask you: Do we miss out on anything by meeting and marrying from a single, exclusive pool? Can love be denatured by seeking it in this college marriage market?
Political scientist Charles Murray fancily uses the term “college sorting machine” to describe the mechanism whereby people with distinctive tastes and preferences are congregated into institutions like universities. Economist Melissa Kearney shares that marriage helps households maintain wealth. So far, so good.
Amass similar students on campus and they will experiment with love, whether frivolously (hello hookup culture) or religiously (“dating for marriage”). The issue I would like to bring to the spotlight is more radical than rich people marrying amongst themselves to remain in their elite microcosm. In seeking a duplicate self as a partner, love is diminished and, perhaps hyperbolizing, or commodified.
Of course, I cannot presume to intellectualize love à la Alain de Botton nor be blind to my sample size being the size of one. Yet, I know too many peers who speak of dating as a second career and unsurprisingly, feel an existential anxiety over finding a partner, equivalent to finding a job. Failure needs not be merely pre-professional, but pre-marital too. The clock is ticking and tuition is rising, after all.
I wish it were a lie that I have fewer fingers than acquaintances who told me that meeting someone at Penn is imperative for legacy admissions reasons. Dare I share what some of them responded when I posed the remote possibility of dating a Drexel student? Please tell me where my logic is flawed when I wonder: Are we, Penn students, so morally superior as to be the only possible and perfect match worthy of being dated?
Let me explain in ridiculous but familiar Wharton terms: what has been forgotten is that romantic relationships should not be treated as a merger target to be found, but as a startup to be grown. Mergers are binary, you set predetermined rigid metrics and search for the best puzzle piece that either fits perfectly or is a mismatch. Mergers traditionally fail. On the other hand, startups are about building. The emotional labor that a relationship necessitates, by nature, is not dissimilar to that required to grow an enterprise, where uncertainty reigns. You have to plant seeds daily without a single guarantee that the whole plant will blossom. You need to hope that by combining a harmonious mosaic of diverse resources, staff, and technology, success will follow. A merger implies compatibility. A startup entails complementarity. Look for complementarity over compatibility.
I shall never judge you for how you decide to do your own business, but I can deprecate your apparent sermons of love: Do not tell me you are choosing love when you seek your same kind. More often than not, what you are choosing is yourself, not love.
Love is the oldest story in the world. It was writer James Baldwin who taught me that what you should seek in love is not yourself but fever and confusion, which is not to say drama and pain, but the emotional capacity to be humbled. Love should confuse you. Easy love is shallow.
Cesar Aira’s streams of consciousness add that a predictable creature of habit like me can appear to a stranger in an apparently random fashion. It is precisely this drastic contrast that humbles someone to love. An unpredictable clash of worlds has the potential to give birth to unabashed frenzy. If you know what to gift to a loved one, do you really know them? How could you truly know someone fully? Can anyone?
It was philosopher Byung-Chul Han who taught me that what I need is not connection but union. Everyone is connected but there is no union. Relationships at Penn are replaced by contacts. Genuine touch and vulnerable intimacy are what get us there by complementing us and yet the little touching that occurs on campus is often either frivolous (hookups) or morally repugnant (sexual violence).
What I am getting at is that once you are introduced to some of the greatest lovers and see what kind of love is possible, it is hard not to see love as inevitably complementary and devastatingly self-forgetting.
The temptation to misunderstand me is irresistible. I know your lives have their own rules which differ from case to case. I acknowledge your religion, cultural traditions, family history, and traumas may all dictate what love means to you and that is fine. I am not saying compatibility of values and interests does not matter. Perhaps you do not care about marriage or are not even seeking a partner! I read too much Adam Grant to not be open to rethinking my opinion, but the point is that I see more egotistical than self-forgetting love at Penn.
I am not dictating what your love should be but offering an observation of what it could be. I just hope you will never have to settle for a relationship based on your hometown and tax bracket or out of convenience and loneliness. Those are not the right reasons to be in a relationship. I will wait for a Mr. Right to change my mind about dating at Penn, but in the meantime, I will meditate more on the question: Why would I seek to be in a relationship with someone who is my exact photocopy?
FRANCESCO SALAMONE is a Wharton junior studying decision processes from Palermo, Italy. His email address is frasala@wharton.upenn.edu.
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