Since Lauren Mendell’s Editorial on dating at Colgate appeared in The Maroon-News, we’ve heard a lot of grumbling from our guy friends. They feel that it’s finally their moment to shine after three years of lurking in the shadows of seniors past. As underclassmen, these boys cringed as the objects of their affection sought out the older man, the senior. Under a senior spell, we ignored the loyal, chronologically challenged boys right under our noses. But just as these senior men are now living the dream, we senior girls are living a recurring nightmare. Senior girls face a severely limited pool of eligible men: our options typically cycle between the ex-boyfriend of a best friend you want to keep, that creepy jug dancer, or the great catch who’s been reeled in by a teen-something new fling. Our guy friends offer us little sympathy; they smugly laugh as we suffer the consequences of our actions over the last three years. But were we ever really “living the life?”

We could bitterly debate this all night long at the Bacon — that is, until our guy friends run over to the jug to hook up with their latest underage fling. But no matter how many Mary specials are sucked dry, we’ll still have differing opinions, based merely on distant memories of personal experiences. So we got some hard data to settle this once and for all.

We predicted that freshman, sophomore, and junior girls aren’t really as happy as everyone seems to think. However, this intuition wouldn’t hold up against our guy and girl friends’ selective memories of younger girls being romanced by handsome upperclassmen. To better understand how men and women from each grade truly feel about the Colgate dating scene, we and the other members of Psych Stats conducted a simple survey. We asked over 200 people, both males and females from all four classes, to tell us how satisfied they were with Colgate’s dating scene. Are freshman, sophomore, and junior girls really as happy with the dating scene as they are commonly thought to be?

Our results indicate that even during the glorious freshman days when “everything, and everyone, were possibilities” for Colgate girls, they are only just as satisfied as freshman boys. And after freshman year it’s all downhill — including the cradle — robbing walks of shame we’ve been reduced to. So Lauren was right that senior girls are unhappy, but she missed the mark when she reminisced about freshman girls living the dream. When we were running around being promiscuous at Derby Days and chasing after older boys who we gazed at longingly through the windows of Nichol’s as we shuffled to the Jug, we weren’t really any happier than our guy friends. Our data indicates that freshman girls and boys show the same initial levels of dating satisfaction, but that females steadily decline from that point whereas males steadily improve. Lauren’s insight that over the years more and more guys became “off-limits” may explain why us girls become less and less enthused with the already dissatisfying Colgate dating scene. But perhaps we also have ourselves to blame for our limited options: our guy friends who frustratingly and supportively watched us clamor upwards are now taking their turn and reaching downwards.

The data confirm that senior girls are less satisfied with the dating scene than are their guy peers. But why is that? Are all future senior classes doomed to this gender disparity in dating satisfaction? In our early days at Colgate, we burned bridges with guy friends by pursuing older men, and now our loyal guy friends have become the very cradle robbers whose affections we used to swoon over. The older guys have left us and Hamilton to begin careers all over the world and we have finally looked under our noses to find that our guy friends have moved on and moved down. Serves us right. We accept our self-imposed position begrudgingly, finding solace only in our ability to pass pearls of wisdom to the younger girls about to follow in our wayward footsteps. Appreciate the men in your own class now, and you can avoid the senior girl blues. Hooking up with that older frat guy now won’t make you happy — it’s only a matter of time before he finds younger prey. And when he does, and you find your tears staining the shirt of your best guy friend, take a second look, and appreciate him now before senior year comes, and you lose him to the next incoming class.