Student quirks create exceptional dating scene
Rice has a bad reputation in the dating department, or so says stereotypes. Our girls are ugly, our guys are nerdy and there is no middle ground between the drunken hookup and marriage without a ring.
Heck, supposedly Playboy’s May 2005 issue rated Rice students among the least sexual of mid-to-high tier private universities. I haven’t checked for myself — I refuse any pornographic publication besides literary erotica from properly unioned sexual entrepreneurs.
But I suppose Playboy provides an apt description of Rice for men who prefer the traditional Playboy type — giggling sacks of silicone who get their personality from a bottle of hair dye. Those who like the Playboy type should probably stop reading this and watch some TV — I’m sure there is something on E! with boobs. But when it comes to rating Rice’s sexual atmosphere, the average student should turn away from Mr. Hefner’s airbrushed extravaganza and look to the second-best free weekly in Houston, the Houston Press.
In 2004, Houston Press rated Rice’s own Valhalla as the best place to meet single women. The dank Keck sub- level certainly is not the favorite watering hole of any Paris Hilton type — and that is what makes it so wonderful. Instead, it is a great place to meet smart women who, as the Press puts it, “may even be a touch out of your league.”
Come to think of it, Rice as a whole is a pretty great place to meet women. It is like Sunset and Main is some magical land where all the smart, driven chicks go to have fun. They roam the quads, ready for an able, young man to be the derivative to their function. Rice is one of the few places where you can you find girls whose idea of a romantic night is curling up on a futon and watching Futurama. And nothing is sexier than a woman who can calculate the speed of light by observing the Galilean moons. Any complaints about hotness are just a testament to Rice women’s unwillingness to conform to silly trends. Plus, free T-shirts are a lot easier to remove than Chanel dresses.
But Rice men get a similarly as bad rap as the university’s women do, if not worse: Rice guys are immature slobs who pay more attention to beirut and textbooks than women. But slobs just means they have priorities higher than fashion, textbooks means they’re driven and beirut means they like to hang out with friends.
And there is something to be said about the claim in the Oct. 2002 Seventeen that Rice has “cute boys of all stripes.” Though more often than not, those stripes are World of Warcraft obsessors or Wikipedia fanatics. But these nerdy pastimes just show that Rice men like to devote themselves to something — which can be bad if it’s a computer game, but good if it’s a girlfriend. Think of it, all the money saved from canceling a WoW subscription could go to a Tiffany’s necklace. Rice boys are cute, shaggy and funloving, but devoted — kind of like puppies. All it takes is the right woman to bring out a noble Underdog.
Maybe that is what leads to Rice’s dating dilemma: The choices are just too good. Meek, former social rejects are too afraid to ask out that cutie in class, and those cuties don’t know how cute they actually are. If the supposedly disproportionate number of hookups to actual dates says anything, Rice students certainly are attracted to one another. They’re just afraid to settle down, given all the other amazing potential mates that dwell on campus. It’s like potato chips, you can’t have just one. Or maybe Rice students are just too socially awkward to take it beyond the hookup. Either way, if Rice students finally do end up in a relationship, they don’t want to let go of the amazing person they’ve found.
So while Hef and whiney campus elitists may disagree, Rice students are quite the catch — but more likely a tropical rarity than your average cod.
Evan Mintz is a Hanszen College junior and opinion and Backpage editor.
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