Stanford’s war on social life

I think student housing is common because university takes up a lot of time and it's convenient to live on campus. One often goes to university away from where they were previously living, and often plans to live somewhere else afterwards, so it's easier to join a community of transients, than to transiently enter a community apart from the university. While there are certainly some issues with lack of outside perspective, living with a community of your peers that are relatively well aligned in daily activities can be a really positive vibe. Of course, it can also be a negative vibe if you're feeling out of sync with the rest of the community and it feels like the rest of the community is in sync.

I transferred to a small engineering school to get my BS, and it was easy to meet people and share common interests and experiences in a way that wasn't possible when I went to a larger, non specific school, without residences and where people had vastly different courses.

I think a lot of schools force (or at least strongly push) for on-campus living during the first years because it makes it easier to build a network of relationships that will hopefully help students navigate the institution. You're not going to spend nearly as much time with as many other students if you're living off campus and only commuting in on days you have classes.

A major reason is that romantic relationship experience compounds, and so it's difficult to start with relationships later in life. For many people, it's much harder to start a first romantic relationship, than it is to develop subsequent ones. Multiple rejections early on, especially when other people seem to find relationships easy, can lead to reduced self-esteem ("Am I creepy? What is wrong with me?" etc.). It can lead to habits such as having a huge fear of rejection and flirting through physical touch, which leads to a lack of confidence reinforced by further rejection, which further erodes romantic confidence in a negative feedback loop.

Low-quality romantic advice on the internet, such as on Reddit, worsens the problem. Anecdotally, I've found the common, highly-upvoted advice of telling a person "I like you" before you're dating to never once work in my personal experience, while leaning in and pausing while paying attention to social cues to kiss on a date actually led to relationships.

My advice to any guys in their 20s trying to date would be:

1) ignore most internet advice on dating (maybe not this comment, but absolutely avoid incel communities and 4chan),

2) consider an experienced psychotherapist for anxiety if you have rejection anxiety, and

3) try to observe a male friend who is good at relationships who is a moral person, and see what he does (e.g. jokes in a flirty way, and notice how he flirts with touch); if you don't know a friend like this, try to make one (e.g. through a social activity like rock climbing or martial arts).

Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon now, but this sounds like the direction the entire country has been heading for a long time now. For each individual choice between risky joy and safe ennui we have chosen the safe option, starting with the riskiest (or at least perceived to be riskiest) behaviors and continuing on. It's hard to argue against most of these choices in isolation, but the final result seems clearly undesirable to me.

So, in my personal experience, I found dating to still be big in university. I think this is rational, as I anticipate it to be harder to find a long-term relationship through online dating in one's early-to-mid twenties, versus dating people knwon in-person.

However, for students anxious about economic opportunities (e.g. due to COVID), I do see the appeal to focus on studies and work experience at the expense of dating.