Nathan Apfel

So we’ve all come back to campus ready for a semester of mature academic growth… and let’s be honest more questionable romantic decisions. At the start of my first semester I wrote an article evaluating the many messy hookup scenarios Yale students might get tangled up in. With a whole semester of first year drama under our belts, it felt like time to revisit the infamous “-cests” and see what kind of situations my classmates have found themselves in now.

 

Roommates/Suitemates: The live-in lover

Last semester I declared that getting with your roommate or suitemate should be a total no-go. But some people took that more as a challenge than a warning… I easily found some fellow students caught up in suite-cest. The anonymous couple are both members of a large mixed gender suite. “Honestly, it’s really convenient,” one of them said, “and it’s not that weird because our suite has so many people in it.” They weren’t able to escape all of the drama though, she casually added that “three suitemates had feelings for me but I only started dating one… so that’s a little awkward!” 

 

Risk: Everything

Reward: Great practice for future cohabitation

 

Club-cest: The membership perks

By this point FOOT-cest and FroCo-cest are pretty insignificant, but a whole new taboo hookup has emerged: club-cest. With shared interests, late night meetings and hours spent in practices or rehearsals, clubs are just brewing with potential for romantic entanglements. Yale students are really invested in their extracurriculars — and apparently also the people in them, just ask any of the club ski team about their week together at Mont Tremblant… When asked about club-cest one Saybrook FroCo remarked “what else are clubs for?” 

 

Risk: Fighting for a leadership position in the club and in the sheets

Reward: Future insider trading partner

 

Class-cest: The seminar sneaky link

Another returning offender, I previously dubbed class-cest as “inevitable” and that rang true for several people I interviewed. It also was dubbed relatively harmless if you can leave things outside of the classroom, but that turned out pretty untrue. When things go south, class-cesters find themselves having to maneuver where they sit in discussion, dreading potential group projects and bolting out of the building as soon as the class is over. One class-cester claims that “whenever romance comes up in our literature seminar he always makes points that are a little too personal and a little too familiar.” That being said, two of the class-cesters mentioned in the last article are actually still together, so I guess not all these “study sessions” end in disaster!

 

Risk: The semester is 13 weeks… that’s a lot of avoiding eye-contact

Reward: Who doesn’t want an academic rivals to lovers arc?

 

Friend Group-cest: Friends with… benefits?

Here’s another new edition to the list of messy hookups. The genesis of first-semester friend groups is messy enough on its own, now add the extra complications of romantic entanglements. Friend group-cest opens the door to group chat debates, rival factions and overall weird dynamics, but given all the time you spend together it’s also one of the most common “-cests.”

 

One accidental homie-hopper says that she “was in a really big friend group and got with two guys who weren’t close at all,” however much to her surprise those guys ended up “bonding over the experience, becoming really good friends then icing [her] out of their group.” Sounds like she did them a favor in the long run? 

 

Another student experienced the opposite, actually having their hookup join their friend group. “We had a crazy, and I mean crazy hook up, and now we’re best friends. We never did it again and never will.” 

 

Risk: Having a new group chat created just to discuss you

Reward: Guaranteed source of entertainment (just for your friends not you)

 

So what was learned from last semester? My original judgement was that these things are “never that serious,” but a few months of college have proven that it’s not that simple either. No matter how “casual” you hope to keep things, feelings have a sneaky way of creeping in. What makes these situations messy isn’t necessarily that you share a class, common room, or friend group, but how you handle things. All of these “-cests” are totally harmless if they’re dealt with maturely — which in fairness is a lot easier said than done.

LIAM HUGHES