Episode 7: Networking II (The Dating Edition)
On finding love in hopeless places and developing relational skills
Most of my classmates have mentioned repeatedly that Wharton feels like high school all over again, especially in the relational-dynamics of school. I closed out my twenties during my first year at Wharton, an environment that feels like a weird test lab of the real world. I say this as a single woman who has experienced numerous relationships throughout her twenties. I've dated across three cities, had a few serious relationships and multiple flings and spent quite a few years in therapy recovering/re-learning from the requisite damage that brings. But never before have I ever felt my age as closely as I do at Wharton.
People at Wharton are bad at relational skills. At first, it struck me that people at Wharton simply don't have great manners. In the early days of term, I thought this was intentional, and therefore malicious. I was judging people for not treating me or their peers right because I thought these were all masterminded games to achieve clout and social power. I was only 50% incorrect.
For example, if two people are in conversation with each other, they will rarely include a third person trying to join the duo with basic introductions. This is particularly weird in an environment where networking protocol dictates that introductions should be made by the person leading the conversation. When I've pointed this out, I've been told, "Oh I thought you already knew this person", which is an outrageous assumption to make in a school of ~1600 people. I cannot keep every possible Bob/Matt/Mike/Josh/Amanda/Rachel/Shreya uniquely indexed as they all "like the outdoors, traveling and wine, and worked in consulting/finance."
And that's not their fault. Wharton forces a 1 month program for all incoming first years called "pre-term" which I've described as an undiscovered circle of hell in my previous post). During preterm, you're averaging meeting about 30 to 50 new people per day for two whole weeks. Also, the school enforces these "community exercises" wherein you have to reveal some transformative traumatic experience to people you met barely 72hrs ago. This is supposed to encourage vulnerability and connection, and instead all it encourages is competitive performance.
The unstated policy of "see and be seen" (abbreviated to CNBC) implies that popular people enjoy the safety of more perceived social capital, but even they worry whether people actually like them or "want something from them." Some say that the summer between the first and second year is a good indicator for who the "real ones" are. The communication rate atrophies once we are not all trapped in the same classes, trips, clubs, apartments and commutes.
At Wharton, I have found that my closest circles are dominated by women. In general, I find that the single women of Wharton come to business school with a fairly cohesive idea of what they want and what they are looking for. In most cases, this aligns with the rest of their personality, as one assumes that a type A overachiever has likely devoted as much thought to their choice of life partner as much to their career. For women, especially, who you end up marrying can impose limiting conditions to your economic/career success. There is still a significant burden on women to absorb tasks of domestic labor, parenting, and professional success. So a lot of women at Wharton want to be able to date selectively.
But they don't. Very few of the women who have found romance at Wharton to be well-matched. Some blame the composition of the classes. Because men and women are selected to be enrolled at parity, this means that single available men are scarce, whereas there are many single available women. This incentivizes the men not to have to choose any one particular partner from the much larger pool of available options. For women who believe that Wharton is their one chance to find a partner (for whatever reason), this adds an additional layer of anxiety to the process of finding someone. Given market conditions and the fact that most people are at b-school to pivot to new careers (or have their jobs pre-assigned upon graduation), the geographic logistics add more ambiguity about who is long-term material.
As a straight woman on Hinge, I see my Wharton classmates presenting themselves to the real world (i.e. outside of the layers of forced social contexts at Wharton). They are being swiped on because they go to Wharton, whereas women at Wharton are actively bemoaning the emotional maturity and relational skills of men already at Wharton. For the single available men, Wharton is an opportunity to "see what's out there" and maybe figure out what they want, in-real-time, as opposed to move with a plan. Every spring semester, it dawns on a fraction of the graduating class that they should compress their MRS-MBA degree into four months. Regardless of the dual degree, you cannot complete it within one semester unless you are genuinely intentional with your time.
That's where I feel old again. Because I spent most of my twenties trying to be in relationships and learning how to be with myself, I had this delusional expectation that at business school I would somehow be around peers who had done similar work on themselves. That the people who could be so intentional and driven about their career could apply the same logic to who they want to be as people, and how they want to connect with communities and relationships that help them realize that version of themselves. I am more accepting of my friends who are in their mid-twenties or even early twenties in trying to figure this out. But I do not understand how men achieve the age of 28/29/30/33 without having done this scale of emotional labor.
I don't understand how the men of Wharton are expecting relationships to be serendipitous when every other aspect of their life (their workouts, their trips, their parties, their expected income and sometimes their sexual conquests) are held up as performance metrics. The bad relational skills could be emblematic of many things. Maybe a society where men are expected to show their relationship worth through their income. Maybe a lot of b-school people hail from jobs so exhausting that they indoctrinate you into capitalism as opposed to giving you the time for reflection/therapy/growth. Maybe the men at Wharton feel different pressures to perform their masculinity (see above re: competitive vulnerability).
The men who are my close friends confess to some of the above. Sometimes, their counter-arguments are fair. They say that the Wharton women checklists sometimes have ridiculous or impossible terms, which is true. Delusional standards operate across both gender groups. And it also reflects of how little the real world people have encountered outside of the context of school. Some are trying to date women significantly younger than them to connect to those who they believe are at the same level of "emotional maturity". Some are sobering up to the idea of accepting marriage, unless they are already spoken for or arranged into marriage back home. And some simply shrug it off. "Whatever happens will happen, it'll be a good time."
I don't understand how comfortable people are with time. I feel the passage of time acutely, and I despise intentional ambiguity. There is a very high level of uncertainty in the world and times we live in, and I strive to communicate, or even commune, with people with as little ambiguity as possible. I don't want to overcomplicate things, but I am also a complex person. This is probably because I felt pushed to "make the most" of every moment of my twenties because "my youth" is scarce and depleting resource. I am also not fully immune to the idea that time will also eat away at whatever physical beauty I possess, which is something that hyper-visible media is happy to shove down my throat with anti-aging, anti-wrinkle creams. I am also not fully immune to the idea that every second I am not bearing a child is a waste of my looks, as per every women's advice column until maybe the last decade or so.
This semester I was super visible to a lot of people, so I attracted a lot more attention than I expected to. My milkshake brought nearly 7.5 candidates to the yard, and less than 50% of them could barely ask me out. Perhaps this can be attributed to the bad relational skills. Perhaps, they were not interested enough in executing on their intentions, even if they were interested in wanting my attention. I have tried at least to the best of my ability by communicating as clearly as possible about my interests, intentions and availability. I think it's unfair if asking for the same is "too much."
Like the Wharton women searching for husbands, I also feel pressure to make meaning from my b-school experience. I am not immune to the shared anxiety, even though I have four spreadsheets holding my life together at any given time. I also know that things like the right kind of relationship cannot be planned for. This is what I learned through my twenties. Dancing at the jagged edge of my desire, of certainty, of knowing what I know and accepting what I don't, what might be out there and the possibility of pleasant surprises is what my twenties were spent building.