<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" The night my now-boyfriend took me out on our first date, I had just finished making myself up after a long day of being naked in his bed. He did all the right things on that date \u2014 he opened the car door, paid for dinner, smelled delicious. He told me I looked beautiful and that he was so excited to be out with me.  We had no qualms with sleeping with each other before we were &amp;quot;official.&amp;quot; We also didn&amp;#039;t hesitate to define our relationship. When sleeping together for a while became something we decided to do exclusively, we made it happen. Sure, we decided in a car at 3 a.m. post-hookup, but we still decided. In her recent Cosmo story &amp;quot;Why Is College Dating So Screwed Up?&amp;quot; Charlotte Lieberman writes that dating in college felt screwed up because we millennials have romantic ADD and can barely sustain emoji-based communication with one another, much less call each other or commit to each other for longer than a night. As a recent college grad, I disagree. College today is a great setting for a committed relationship, even if the way couples get together now is very different from how our parents got together. We are not actually doomed to go through college single, unsatisfied, and used by dudes taking advantage of our willingness to sleep with them before monogamy. Lieberman says that in the messed-up world that is college dating, &amp;quot;it always feels like the person who cares less ends up winning.&amp;quot; While that is a valid reality for many college students, there&amp;#039;s also a flip side: Many women choose to emotionally invest in romantic entanglements, voice their desires with romantic partners, and expect to be treated chivalrously. And they get what they want, be it a committed relationship or a few years of fun flings. While the media&amp;#039;s obsession with hook-up culture \u2014 particularly how it leaves women feeling objectified and unsatisfied \u2014 makes long-term college relationships out to be extremely rare if impossible commodities, a recent Facebook analysis found that almost 30 percent of married couples who are 25 years old met their spouses in college. Many women aren&amp;#039;t nearly as disempowered by college romances as the media makes us seem. We get to school and realize we aren&amp;#039;t going to be wined and dined unless we demand it \u2014 so some of us (like me) do demand it. Some of us hate dinner dates, so we gladly say &amp;quot;fuck it&amp;quot; and meet guys at parties. We sleep with guys because we want to, not because we feel like this is the only way we&amp;#039;ll connect with anyone romantically at all. Here&amp;#039;s a common scenario: A girl meets a guy named Danny during syllabus week. She promptly forgets about him until she makes out with him one night after a couple vodka sodas and an ironic shot of Fireball. Danny becomes Fireball Danny. She ends up seeing him at the gym, in class, in the caf\u00E9, by the mailboxes \u2014 everywhere. They continue making out at parties and then six weeks later, she realizes she&amp;#039;s seen no one but Fireball Danny because there&amp;#039;s something so wonderful and easy about spending time together.  Stephanie, 22, a childhood friend of mine, is now engaged to her Fireball Danny-equivalent. &amp;quot;When we first started hooking up, I was kind of mad that I wasn&amp;#039;t getting more out of it,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;But then I realized, there wasn&amp;#039;t much more I wanted. I wanted to make out and be cuddled and wasn&amp;#039;t really looking for anything else. We just kind of fell into a pattern because we weren&amp;#039;t making out with and cuddling with anyone else. There was no &amp;#039;talk,&amp;#039; or no &amp;#039;what are we?&amp;#039; type of thing. We just worked because it was convenient and then realized it was more than that.&amp;quot; This is how so many twentysomethings find love now. We do it differently than our moms, but that doesn&amp;#039;t mean we&amp;#039;re not doing it. I know so many people my age who are in long-term relationships. Of those couples, more of them than not found their long-term partner at a college party. A few were drawn together by a shared frustration with long bathroom lines at frat parties. I met my best friend Melissa, 22, on the first day of college. I watched as she immersed herself in &amp;quot;hookup culture&amp;quot; for the first two years of school. &amp;quot;My mom used to tell me that college was for not being tied down, that the whole point was to have your fun now so that it&amp;#039;s out of your system later,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;But actually, that annoyed me. There&amp;#039;s only so many half-night stands I could take before I decided I wanted more.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s when Melissa realized how small the dating pool at school could be. She (and all of her friends) encountered the same noncommittal boys at bars and frat parties over and over again. So she sought out quiet guys who, frankly, weren&amp;#039;t drunk all the time. &amp;quot;When I decided I was done with hooking up, falling into a relationship actually happened super-quickly.&amp;quot; Melissa met her boyfriend at a bar one night, where they talked for an hour soberly on the bathroom line. Voila, they&amp;#039;ve been together for two years. Getting what you want is not a matter of lowering expectations. Sometimes, guys are sick of hooking up, too. It took Cara (a friend&amp;#039;s roommate), now 22, just five months to realize that she was tired of making out with the same three people and that she wanted something different. She&amp;#039;d always thought Jon, a junior at the time, was cute, but had only heard that he was &amp;quot;asexual,&amp;quot; she remembers now. &amp;quot;It came up one day that Jon had a reputation for not having a reputation, which, obviously, meant everyone thought he was gay,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s not, and he didn&amp;#039;t care that people thought so. He was just sick of fucking around and stopped. I guess that&amp;#039;s where we clicked.&amp;quot; Three years into their relationship, they laugh about this. My boyfriend and I have now been together for as much time out of college as in, so I know I&amp;#039;m biased. I have just as many single friends from college as committed ones. Everyone knows people who get engaged the second they take off their caps and gowns. Everyone knows someone whose brother/roommate/friend is married to his or her college sweetheart. We may play games and have sex before monogamy, but my generation is still choosing to fall in love in college. Follow Tess on  Twitter. Photo Credit: Gold Circle Productions "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/advice/a5564/college-dating-isnt-screwed/?click=rel>