Last week, some intrepid soul left a note seeking a missed connection on the outer wall of Blue State’s Wall Street location. If that were you, that was incredibly cute and I love you and thank god you didn’t leave your phone number because you’d probably have been McKinseygated.  If not, please enjoy what I imagine Yale’s version of the New York Times’s “Tiny Love Stories” column would look like:

When? Three days after move-in. Where? The four-mile-long line outside the Student Receiving Center. I was picking up the seventh floor fan we were installing in our 92-degree common room, in which two of my suitemates had been lying catatonic and dehydrated since night one of Camp Yale. He was picking up a super sick and unique poster of this underground band called The Strokes for his room. He mentioned it was a dingle, and I knew he was the one.

We locked eyes over the pulsating Abrahamic beats of the AEPi dance floor. He grabbed my hand and twirled me into a spinning circle of horah-ing pledges in metallic booty-shorts. He tried to whisper his name in my ear, but the sweat which had begun cascading down my face four minutes into the party had formed a liquid blockade against his oral advances. All I know is… I think it started with a J??

I contracted a disease at SOADS – the love bug! Also COVID, and maybe syphilis…

I needed someone to fuck my way down the Stacks with; so did she. Could I make it any more obvious? We became official on floor eleven, said “I love you” on floor seven, and I proposed to her in the women’s bathroom by the Periodical Reading Room. It was so romantic, especially with someone sobbing heavingly in the stall next door!

First semester, we both had non-COVID hacking coughs. Branded as social pariahs for our oral emissions, we formed an Outsiders-esque clan, the two Holden Caulfields of Old Campus. “I just tested negative!”  we would shout in vain at disgusted passerby as we hawked globules of mucus into paper towels in the Bass bathrooms.  Post-Omicron, we’ve been welcomed back into civil society, but our phlegmy bond will never be broken.

We met at a meeting for the Party of the Right … our names aren’t in this, right?

We were both subjected to surprise a cappella concerts on different parts of Old Campus. Fleeing the hypnotic harmonizing of a dozen quirky teenage boys in suits, we found refuge in the annals of the Vanderbilt courtyard, where few dare to venture. Now we’re choosing a wedding band — we’ve agreed it has to be one with instruments.

Stranded in the alumni section of the tailgate for The Game, I stumbled through tables of forty-five year olds taking fluorescent Jell-O shots, searching in vain for someone who had attended Yale in the past two decades. There she was, cowering in a corner as a man with a bald spot offered her a White Claw Surge and asked her if the men in JE were still the sexiest on campus. I asked her to go to the Port-A-Potties with me, and we’ve been attending games together ever since.

We were both barred from entering Zeta’s “Summer in Winter on the Beach in the Mountains but It’s a Little Cloudy so Think About Maybe Bringing a Cardigan or Like a Warm Sweatshirt” party for not adhering to the theme closely enough. We bought a romantic dinner at the gas station next door and wandered the neighborhood, stopping to throw little pieces of bread to the starving inhabitants of Arnold Hall like we were at a duck pond.

Dear reader, Yale can be a cold, harsh, difficult place. I hope you’ll take just a little bit of time while you’re here to search for love and that you’ll make or adopt beautiful elitist bulldog babies twenty years down the line.

Or maybe just drunk text one of your DataMatches; I don’t care.