Everything is (Un)Romantic

Some names have been changed, some haven’t.

By Rocky Rūb

Illustration by Em Bennett

Three and a half years ago, I started making a playlist for every semester. It’s a maladaptive practice, in which I imagine that each 14-week stretch of time makes up a television season, and that each playlist makes up its soundtrack. I’m the main character, obviously, but a couple tracks focus on my friends, the featured cast members. There are times that I actually can’t listen to the playlists without shuddering into the feelings they recall. For example, “szn 4 (still renewed??!!)” includes a four-track progression that starts with Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky,” “Binz,” and “Bad Girls - Verdine Version,” then finishes with “Heaven (Live) - 2023 Remaster” by the Talking Heads—some people just can’t handle turning 20! Despite the risk of aggressive regression, these playlists are a great way to excavate the memories associated with them, especially while entering the final months before the Great Epochal Pivot: graduation. 

Romanticizing Columbia through these playlists and delusions of HBO-level production grandeur is a necessity. Behind the classical architecture lies a brutalist reality. There is nothing romantic about being a freshman during the first week of September, sweating profusely in an oversized sweater in the middle of a Joe Coffee while trying to impress a sophomore in a pre-professional club who chokes with sinister, impish delight on their extra-sweet iced caramel latte when you say that you read the entire catalog of ships in The Iliad. In your defense, you did think it’d demonstrate your thorough attention to detail. But what is romantic is listening to “There She Goes” by The La’s on the walk there and getting a little tingle in your nose because, for the first time, you feel so college. It’s all captured in these playlists.

…

It was hot and humid when I saw Liam for the first time, but unfortunately, only because it was the end of August. We were first-years nearing the end of the New Student Orientation Program, and I was sitting on the South Lawn, talking to a child actress about being from a small town, feeling grateful to be invited to the party. He strutted past us in a white tank top and black sunglasses, walking in sync with his fellow long-legged future roommate. I faintly remember someone playing Beyoncé’s “CUFF IT” on a speaker, but that could be a retroactive association. When I met him properly three weeks later, I added “invisible string - the long pond studio sessions” to the season one soundtrack, and not just because folklore rules that month like a planet rules a horoscope. 

If there is a singular truth about being a freshman undergraduate, it’s that everything is embarrassing and every day feels like a Sky Ferreira song—and if you’re not aware of it then, you will be later. It’s not high school, but growing into your own at Columbia boasts particular maladies for the young adult’s coming-of-age. It’s like a second puberty, but worse because now your acne is adult and you have access to excessive amounts of alcohol. Thus, your novel independence only energizes hormonal impulses that will haunt you every time you walk into the Diana Center Cafe (two words: rejection smoothie). And obviously, everyone’s horny. Yet, collegiate sexual fantasies are cursed with post-pubescent growing pains that liken freshmen year hookups to what, in theory, could be the most carnal, XXX-rated, passionate sex of your life, but turns out to be an amateur Snapchat sex tape with a lot of pre-cum and little satisfaction. 

To put it simply, nothing is romantic. Communal Shower Sex? NASTY! Two men sharing a Twin XL bed? Sweatiest nights of my life. And no, roommates will never, EVER, be an acceptable option for a third—it doesn’t matter how badly they want it! And that’s just the sex stuff; dating here isn’t particularly primed for romance, either. Much to the chagrin of all of my straight girlfriends, most men in the straight-sphere at Columbia are either entitled, off-putting, clandestinely a 34-year-old GS student—or all three. In the gay-sphere at Columbia, everyone’s interconnectedness preemptively ruins anything that could resemble a meet-cute. By the time I met Jean-Luc, my first gay friend (maybe) ever, he seemed to have already spoken with, analyzed, and resolved his judgments for every gay man in the class of 2026 (not just at Columbia, but in the greater NYC area). But he got away with it because he was always the first to deliver gossip, for instance that about the twins who had a foursome with the (not so platonic) best friends in a double room in John Jay. 

There is not a single reason why someone should go to college and immediately start dating the first person they find themselves attracted to. In fact, you can tell how reasonable and sane a person is if they agree that one should not turn eighteen and immediately commit themselves to the first person that they like. And this is an anxiety-inducing axiom if you go to college and start dating someone only three months in. “Everyone will break up and swap partners by the spring,” Jean-Luc told both of us on a Sunday in November, over fried mac ‘n’ cheese bites and dino nuggets. “That’s what Weston says happens every year.” Weston was a senior who liked to prey on freshmen twunks and would ask me and Liam questions like, “Will you guys have marble or quartz countertops in your kitchen?” People like Weston and Jean-Luc had their own way of making being in a relationship in college look embarrassing, or like an inside joke, which everyone on the outside had their own interpretation of. 

Liam is good at laughing off things like this and making me laugh, which, like music, makes an otherwise awkward moment somewhat sweet. 

When we kissed for the first time, it was in sterile white light, under the low ceilings of the 13th floor hallway of Carmen Residence Hall. I had walked Liam back to his room from an oh-so-gauche gathering of our first-year peers on the South Lawn outside Butler Library. It was maybe the second or third weekend of what my friends and I started calling “larties” (lawn-parties), and over my third, and last, White Claw Surge, I stumbled over my words and told him that I had a small bladder. He laughed, thank God. I took a picture of him lounging on the grass on Snapchat (the only reason I haven’t deleted the app from my phone) that says quite plainly, talking to this guy right now. In the app’s photo library, it’s right next to a photo from the morning before, where I’m wearing a pair of green sunglasses, captioned, “first hangover in nyc!” We look like scrawnier variants of who we are now, and it seems impossible for two people to change so much in only four years. We clearly had no talent for subtlety or discernment, hence my naming of my small bladder for comedic flirting and his senseless choice to keep talking to me. 

I laugh every time I tell someone that our first date was at Chef Mike’s, but it’s also a privilege that Liam has turned what could have been some of the most mortifying moments of my life into magical surrealism. It was my first time going to the dining hall, and we met in front of Butler, which I didn’t realize was out of the way. He was wearing a black and white striped shirt, cuffed crisp navy jeans, and Dr. Marten x Jean-Michel Basquiat boots, looking like the cutest American punk mime Alma Mater has ever seen. It was only days after we kissed in Carmen, and the low hum of our mutual coyness excited the air between us. It must’ve been an off time, because I was able to build my own sandwich without waiting in line (guac, chipotle mayo, turkey, pepper jack, lettuce, banana peppers, red onions, olive oil). Liam told me about his dogs (the Shawties), and was generous with his laughter when I tried to make jokes about being a hometown hero. 

About a week after we shared our first Mike (sandwich), Liam called me to meet him outside of Wallach Residence Hall, where I lived. My sister was visiting, so I left her in my room to wait. To this day, I think she likes him so much because when I walked back to my room, I was holding daisies, wilting slightly, but only because it was still so hot outside. I hated my shafted room on the third floor, and how it didn’t have an A/C unit. I should have PTSD from that bleak, damp dorm with the recurring character that I named Denise (a small mouse), but because of Liam, it’s nauseatingly sentimental. 

…

This Valentine’s Day will be our fourth, so I’m feeling especially cognizant of how different my life would be had we not met through that friend of a friend, who I wouldn’t have met had I not sat in that exact seat at the NSOP academic assembly. Back then, we used fake IDs and shaved our chest hair, trying to be adults while clinging to our adolescent glow. Growing out of that was a necessity for our relationship, because now, I’m mature enough to see the dark curls growing on his sternum for what they are: stupid hot, and a visual cue to show the audience that time has passed. 

It feels good to be known like this. It feels good to have this history. I used to be scared of this kind of proximity and how someone could so intimately witness my life—I’m an Aquarius! But because it’s all shared with him, what should have been a controversial, cringe-centered, but interesting nonetheless, satirical limited series (kind of like Lena Dunham’s Girls), became a charmingly messy, critically acclaimed, and complex rom-com drama for fans of Charli XCX. For every “Shameika” by Fiona Apple (i.e., crash outs, fights, club rejections, job rejections, bombed tests, or professor smackdowns), there’s a “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None The Richer (i.e., Liam listens to me rant, takes my side, and reminds me that I’m prettier than all rival parties). This kind of solidarity is invaluable, and because it’s not exclusively reserved for the romantically inclined, it makes me feel exceptionally lucky to be in love with my best friend in this way. 

We’ll always have Chef Mike’s, and Carmen 13, and Wallach 3. The fact that these places are cosmically entangled with the foundations of our relationship is laughable and, at times, complicated. It’s needless to say that most students at Columbia graduate with both prideful and disillusioned relationships to this university; and we can attest to both. We are no longer like the Scholar’s Lion, ribs flared, hungry for knowledge. While learning to think critically with the help of some Great Books, I’ve been unwittingly collecting millions of memories hued with both that French rose color and Columbia Blue. Now, my ribs, flared with laughter instead of hunger, like the early Lorde track, are sore from delightful overindulgence. I couldn’t be more grateful.