Hell hath no fury like a woman, a man or a salacious Yalie scorned.
Fear not, for in this day and age, the World Wide Web has you covered. Under the guise of anonymity that only the dot-com haven can provide, would-be lovers and infatuated Elis now have a place to vent: GoodCrushYale.com. The Web site was created by GoodCrush Inc., a New York-based company founded in 2007 by Princeton alum Josh Weinstein.
So far, in addition to Yale, GoodCrush Inc. has launched sites for the rest of the Ivy League, plus Stanford, NYU and MIT.
The site relies on user-generated content, where each user can list a number of his or her crushes. Unidentified e-mails are sent to students on this list to alert them. If two students list each other as crushes, then, surprise! Their identities are revealed to each other. Likewise, users can post little blurbs about their so-called “good crush.” Here’s the premise:
“Thinking about someone? or something? Did you almost, could have, would have, should have — but didn’t? Post about it here. They’ll see it, and who knows … magic may ensue.”
In other words, the site assumes that unrequited love irreversibly turns us into creepers, the stalkers of our objects of affection. Just like middle school. Several dead poets roll around in their graves with each new post, crafted with lyrical yet harrowing details describing the target of passion.
All posts are titled under the location of each fateful encounter, and since this past Tuesday, there have been 76 missed connections at Yale, according to the Web site. A person can submit an entry under any type of gender-seeking-gender pursuit, and under the categories of “playful and innocent,” “friendly,” “purely academic” or, of course, “not innocent.”
A few gems:
LC; female seeking male — posted Dec. 16th
“You’re the smartest person in my English class, by far. I sat next to you sometimes, but never said a word to you. Your brilliant comments and the way your hair falls across your forehead are what got me through the semester.”
category: playful and innocent
Dport Dining Hall; male seeking male — posted Dec. 17th
“Spotted: I see you there, every time I come in for dinner. Standing so pensively with a textbook under your arm… I love your red hat and yellow pants, but maybe you could wear something else sometime? Your facial hair keeps reminding me how out of my league you are. Do you love me too?”
category: playful and innocent
Still, although these tags are meant to generalize, they may not guarantee that you would be going incognito, as this male-seeking female seems to prove:
Yale; female seeking male — posted Dec. 17th
“I saw you…posting on goodcrush. Get back to work.”
category: not innocent
Amen.