Courting Dances

On relationships, labels, and keeping love alive.  

By Ana Sorrentino

Illustration by Iris Pope

The names in this piece have been changed to respect the sources’ romantic privacy. Upon reading, I’m sure you’ll understand why. 

In high relief against the outer wall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, white birds bathe in shallow pools of melted snow along the plaza’s edge. In soft crowds they stretch wings, pivot, and stare. Two take off flying around in a frantic chase to the dirt path on my right. Once settled, their dance begins. He bows to her, puffing out his chest in a purplish sheen, yet she turns and struts away. She’s heard this song before. He remains persistent, strutting in circles and cooing low while she pecks at crumbs, ever so slightly glancing up to see if he’s watching.

The circling, the pauses, the glances, it all felt strangely familiar. Does this careful dance of courtship echo the same hesitations and small performances we put on in our own romantic interactions, or have they been twisted in today’s world of labels, screens, and endless negotiations? We humans have our own messy attempts at connection, but watching these birds brought back something alive and spontaneous that we are lacking among today’s cautious and measured calculations. 

This tendency to script is no more so reflected than in a modern obsession with labels and the way we let them dictate our relationships. Labels feel safe, offering the illusion of control in a world that is messy, unpredictable, and demanding. It isn’t that terms like “talking,” “situationship,” or “exclusive” are meaningless—they often reflect real differences in intimacy and expectation. But our generation clings to these categories as if defining the stage defines the substance. In doing so, the dating scene loses its fun, its spontaneity. Nowadays, so many people are stuck in an awkward, undefined limbo that could so easily be resolved by letting go of the rules. 

Margie 

When Margie and I first met she was “talking” to someone from her NSOP group. She insisted the attraction sparked during an Arts and Media tango class, but it was sealed later that night over shots at 1020 and a round of pool he paid for. 

If you know Margie, you know she’s a ball of joy. Her boundless openness and excitement could carry any situation which was necessary on their first “date” at Pinkberry that lasted exactly 30 minutes and consisted entirely of a conversation about their Macro class. For the next two months, Margie and him exchanged awkward hellos that somehow felt worth it when she got us into every SigEp function for free. They hooked up every time. 

A few months later, maybe when Margie stopped texting her ex back home, or when he finally found something more riveting to talk about, they began spending more and more time together. They went on dates in December and January. He bought her flowers for Valentine’s Day. In every observable way they were dating. So, when Margie told me last week that they had moved from “talking” to “exclusive,” but not yet “official,” the announcement felt futile. As if anything in their relationship that felt alive, that hovered with possibility, had to be flattened into terminology. 

Still, she’s happy. And maybe that’s the only part that matters.

Carlos 

Carlos and I don’t often talk about our romantic lives, but one night he called me around 3 a.m., panicked. I knew he’d been “seeing” someone, but on a recent night out he asked if his date wanted to come back to his dorm to spend the night—for the first time. The guy merely shrugged and smiled. Carlos didn’t know how to react, so he smiled back, left, and spent the rest of the night staring at the ceiling in my room. 

Since late October they have been texting, going on small dates and hooking up. They see each other most weekends. They get dinner and hangout after. It looks like it’s going somewhere, but it never does. As Carlos describes it, “it’s complicated.” A complicated situation that’s lasted five months. 

Carlos explains that sometimes it feels like they are getting closer to something—with an intimate conversation or a hug that lasts too long,—just to have it all retract again. “One step forward three steps back, and all of a sudden we’re not talking for days.” They’ve both acknowledged the confusion of this cycle calling themselves “the ultimate situationship.” Though I feel like once you’ve defined what you are, it becomes easier to behave inside that definition. 

For five months Carlos has been trapped in a careful choreography, measuring every word, timing every text, calculating how much he can reveal without risking it all. The dance continues, but there is nothing natural about the movement.

Frieda

Frieda downloaded Hinge at the beginning of the school year, mostly for fun. She enjoyed judging prospective suitors and seeing who her profile attracted. Sometimes she flirted with matches, indulging in meandering conversations that evaporated into nothing. It was only before winter break that something felt different. Another Columbia student, whose photos and profile suggested ease and wit. They messaged for about three weeks before deciding to meet in person. 

Their plan was simple: They were going to meet in her dorm to watch a movie, and see where things went from there. Yet the moment they met outside Wallach, Frieda felt a jolt of regret. He was noticeably shorter than his profile, lost all sense of style, and his crew cut now fell way past his shoulders in a dark, unwieldy river. He wore high-knee military lace-up boots that clicked against the pavement like a slow, stubborn drum. For a heartbeat, she was frozen, wondering how the man constructed on her phone had morphed into the figure standing before her. Inside, they settled on her bed, and the flickering light of her computer screen washed over them as a four-hour Godard film began to play.

She felt zero attraction, yet she couldn’t tell if he suffered the same private discomfort. Every minute stretched taut between them until Frieda couldn’t take it anymore. She paused the movie 56 minutes in, told him she was sorry, but she didn’t want to make up any excuses, and asked if he could please head back to his dorm. Frieda watched him gather his coat and wallet and sat there as he methodically laced each boot for 10 minutes in silence. 

Perhaps if they hadn’t met on Hinge, if she had been forced into the proximity of polite in-person expectation, she might have seen him differently. Frieda acknowledges that in meeting online she had defined him before ever meeting him. As simple as “easygoing,” or, “funny,” are quick judgments that can be extracted from a profile, and in just a few weeks of messaging, there was an expectation for a reality to which he could never live up. It wasn’t his fault when she assigned him to a category that he couldn’t fit. 

…

If these situations tell us anything, it’s that maybe it’s time to revert back to unmediated connection. Let go of the words, the rules, the apps and pay attention to the dance itself. In our constant need to categorize everything, we’ve obscured the messiness of human interaction, and that messiness is what keeps love alive.