But what does that mean? And how do we navigate the rocky waters of a serious relationship? The only guides we have are cheesy sitcoms. Do we actually need to exchange letter sweaters? Make a fuss on the six-month anniversary? Spend every waking moment together, or have our own time? Talk about every little detail of our childhoods? Can we disagree on something big and still be happy together?

It can be a difficult job to sift through what expectations to set in a healthy, supportive relationship. The important thing, however, is to do just that and have a clear idea of what your expectations are. If you’re expecting flowers every week but the significant other doesn’t believe in giving gifts, someone’s going to get their feelings hurt. Or if going out with friends of the opposite sex is upsetting for one person but not the other, some ground rules should be set. Living the monogamous life has plenty of pitfalls, but the smart, communicative couple can avoid most of them.

There’s no need to be mad jealous. The sitcoms always have a titanic rift in the relationship occurring if somebody goes out to a party without their s/o. Seriously, your boyfriend or girlfriend can have their own life. If you’ve got a ton of work and can’t go out one night, don’t guilt trip the other into staying home. If you both trust each other, there’s nothing wrong with hanging out with friends without one’s other half, even with members of the opposite sex. Unlike on TV, the mere presence of other girls will not make your boyfriend start salivating.

Talk things out, but also go to bed mad if necessary. The old proverb tells us never to go to bed mad and there’s something to be said for it; if issues are allowed to fester, they’ll eventually tear a couple apart. But it’s also smart to pick the right time to talk things out. If it’s late at night and you’re both stressed and exhausted, you’ll both just end up saying things you don’t mean and end up fogging up a problem rather than clarifying it. Agree to disagree until you’re both ready to tackle an issue.

Decide what your dealbreakers are. It’s important to know what you’re willing to weather and what you’re not. What are the problems or differences that would make you think the relationship would no longer work? It may sound grim to think about, but if you find yourself surprised by something you didn’t know about your s/o that leaves you wondering, make sure you know the difference between something that can be worked out and something that can’t. And be flexible! Surprises aren’t always a bad thing. In fact, it’s continually learning new things about your bf or gf that keeps a serious relationship fresh and invigorating. Not every difference is a dealbreaker.

Be where you’re needed. Ok, so you’ve decided you’re “going steady” now. It means committing to another person in a serious way – not just for having fun, but for the rocky times too. That may be the main difference between a fling and a serious relationship. In a fling, you stop being together whenever it stops being fun to be with that person. In a serious relationship, you’re there to be a shoulder to cry on and also an ear for complaints. Your bf or gf should support you, but that means supporting him or her just as much. In this egotistical age, we tend to forget that second bit.

Ah, fall. With its gorgeous colors, crisp air and back-to-school excitement, it’s undoubtedly my favorite season. The only problem with fall is that it leads into my least favorite season, winter. Being a New England gal, I’ve begrudgingly grown used to braving heavy snow and freezing temperatures, but there’s something else about winter that I’m not wild about.

It’s that, well, I get downright…mannish.

My appetite grows with the cold weather and I start scarfing down everything in sight. Science says that is my way of packing on extra pounds to stay warm, but I know it is just that warm Mac and Cheese just tastes so. good. in the winter.

I bundle up in clothes that don’t exactly show off my figure so I can be warm, and let’s just say I get a little lazy about regularly shaving my legs. And forget about wearing something pretty and feminine, like a short skirt. Nope, it’s my warmest baggy jeans and clunky boots all the way. With my hat pulled down over my hair, I’m one step away from getting an, “Excuse me, young man” when I bump into someone on the street.

I am getting a bit worried that my boyfriend will soon forget what it is like to date a girl, so I am making it my goal to retain a bit of femininity this winter. Below are a few things we can all do to draw the line between hibernating animal and college girl braving the winter winds.

If you want to look cute and feminine and still stay warm, there are ways. For one, you may not want to shave your legs every day, but a pair of pantyhose will hide that and keep your legs warm if you opt for a skirt. Use your layers wisely: start with a silk undershirt for warmth, and then a nice form-fitting shirt and sweater combo should be enough to keep you warm.

On the outside there’s not much you can do to dress up a parka, but go for a tailored pea coat for as long as you can hold it out. Dress up those somber winter colors with a colorful hat and scarf combo. And for that touch of boho chic, get a pair of cheap wool gloves and cut the fingers off. I need my hands to be warm in winter while having the dexterity for writing/texting, and I’ve received many compliments on my handmade fingerless gloves.

If you’re still feeling overly masculine, do something pleasantly girly, like curling up with a mug of hot chocolate. The best part of winter for me is feeling cozy indoors, especially if you’ve got someone to cozy up with. Bonus if that someone doesn’t care how often you shave your legs, or how much winter pudge you’ve packed on.

Without giving it away, I couldn’t help laughing even as I blushed. At the same time, I learned a lot about what NOT to do when the realities of our bodies inevitably trip us up.

1. You must talk about sex. On Chesil Beach is set in the early sixties, a time when it was “simply impossible” for anyone to discuss sex. It’s the ultimate taboo subject even when people are married, and as a result, couples who get together barely know what to do with each other or even what to expect.

In the book, Florence is given a brief pamphlet about the bare bones of sex, but she still doesn’t have the first clue of what to do or what will happen on the man’s side of things. Because of this huge taboo of talking about sex, neither of them can talk healthily about it when things go wrong. Times have changed a lot since then, but I still think the taboo stands in a lot of situations. We’re not supposed to say certain words, protest if something hurts, or talk about what we want. But without having these difficult and embarrassing conversations, people will end up being disappointed, hurt, or just plain confused.

2. Don’t feel ashamed. A powerful sense of shame is another reason why Florence and Edward feel paralyzed in McKewan’s book. When things go wrong, Florence immediately assumes it’s her fault, she has done something wrong. Edward similarly feels ashamed for having “failed.” In reality, sex the first time is harder than TV and movies make it out to be. It takes a little finagling to get the jigsaw pieces together, so to speak, and if either girl or guy feels shame about this, it will taint the whole experience.

3.The girl’s gotta feel good too! In the world of On Chesil Beach, women were expected to be entirely passive. In fact, a woman who enjoyed sex too much was regarded with suspicion. Sex is supposed to be something that women just bear or tolerate, and not much side stuff was done for the woman’s pleasure. Thankfully, in this modern day and age we know that it’s just as important for women to have fun as men! If your partner is neglecting your pleasure, you’ve got to speak up and say so. Sex shouldn’t have to be something to be borne for anyone.

4. Be supportive, and be able to laugh. First times are awkward. They just…are. The worst thing would be losing your sense of humor if things get a bit silly. As long as you’re not laughing at your partner, of course! You’ve both got to be there for each other, and be able to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. If you’re too serious, and are expecting a home run on the first try, then everyone is just going to end up disappointed. So relax! There’s gotta be a first time, and as long as you are communicative, you can survive the awkwardness with your sense of humor intact.

A male friend of mine was talking about how the mailroom guy on campus was so grouchy. “He gives you this glare and doesn’t say a word even when you say hi,” he said.

I was surprised. “I’ve seen him smile and say hi.”

My friend rolled his eyes. “Well of course. You’re a girl.”

I protested, but as I interacted with him again and again I realized that the mailroom guy was just nice to girls. And it was the same with the post office workers, the cafeteria workers, and a handful of other strangers I interact with on a regular basis. Before you think I’m padding my own ego and saying I’m smoking hot, let me assure you, it wasn’t just me. People are just more likely to treat a girl politely, to smile and be more helpful.

At first I thought, What luck! Girls can finally enjoy something about being a girl! But as the overactive-feminist part of my brain worked on this new idea, I liked it less and less.

I don’t want special treatment because I’m looking feminine, and in particular, I don’t want this kind of special treatment. It seems too much like men feel like they have to coddle me, to help me out with things because I’m too weak or stupid to figure it out myself. Hence, the post office worker’s painstakingly slow explanation of how the automatic stamp machine works. I noticed he let a man just work the machine himself, but he felt it necessary to do every step for me. This is killing me with kindness if ever I’ve seen it.

Still, I can’t decide if it’s just one of those things I should enjoy about being a girl, or if I should be getting all hot and bothered about it. After all, there’s nothing wrong with a little friendly interaction. Why not smile at someone and get a smile in return? But the friendly feeling that comes with an interaction sours a little if I think that I’m getting this treatment just because I’m a girl. It’s just one of those pesky, small things that makes me feel like a little less than an individual.

So while there’s nothing wrong with friendliness, I feel like I should assert myself a little more in interactions with strangers. If somebody tries to do something for me again, the next time I should step up and say, “Thanks, but no thanks — I can handle it myself.” After all, I am a woman.

The most common insult for a freshmen: “man, that guy is trying too hard.” When coming to a competitive ivy league school, freshmen are immediately aware that the kids around them are some of the best students in the country. They probably were the small-town star of their high school, and now feel desperate to assert themselves, to still be the big fish in the rapidly expanding pond. Thus, while sitting next to a few freshmen chatting in a dining hall the other day, I was sad — sad, but not surprised — when after about 2 minutes, the test score discussions began.

“So what did you get on your SAT’s? I got ___.”

After the test scores, came the trips-to-Europe competition.

“I’ve been to Rome twice.” “Oh yeah, I went too, and Paris, and all over France as well.”

This is the epitome of Trying Too Hard, and you can see why it’s so annoying to upperclassmen. Freshmen exhibit the dreaded Trying Too Hard in every aspect of life, from reading every footnote and side-reference in the reading (and loudly announcing the fact in class), to getting ridiculously drunk because they think that’s the way college life really is. In a big, scary, competitive new school, these over-achieving high schoolers try applying the drive and shameless self-promotion it takes to get into college — to every aspect of life. It’s enough to make an upperclassmen want to avoid the eating clubs and especially any intro-level classes.

We don’t really need to compete with each other in this obnoxious way; there’s room for all of us to shape our personalities while in college, to find our own niches and be interesting people regardless of what test scores we have or how many countries we’ve visited. If only the freshmen would learn this a bit quicker — though I’m sure I went through my Trying Too Hard phase as well. I seem to remember bragging about my family’s trips to France as a Freshman… So we’ve all been there, but we don’t like to remember it.

Please, freshmen — just relax.

The other thing that paralyzed me, and that made me think it wouldn’t matter if I voted even in the presidential election, was the electoral college. I’m from good old Massachusetts — you know, the first state to legalize gay marriage, the so-blue-we-don’t-even- see-the-color-red state, the most liberal state in the union. There is never a contest about who wins our state’s votes. In fact, the politicians don’t even try; in the last election, I didn’t see a single presidential campaign ad.

So why bother voting? My vote amounts to a spit in the wind, and as long as we’re not talking about national popular vote as an option, things are going to stay that way. Still, though, I felt a renewed urge to cast my vote this year, because more than ever it seems like a year when a tremendous amount is at stake. Like hundreds of millions of others, I’ve seen my country slowly going down the tubes in the past eight years. It’s gotten a lot harder to be proud of my country, and I see the ideals it stands for increasingly obscured by smoke.

That’s when I found out that several states — including my college’s state of New Jersey — have voted to pledge their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular election. Hot damn, my vote counts for one vote again! It’s a very exciting and rebellious move on the part of several states who are tired of only Ohio and Pennsylvania getting all the love.

So I registered!

And you should too. For all you college students out there, register for an absentee ballot the next time you’re in your hometown, or you can register to vote in your college’s state as long as you have a resident address there. College democratic and republican organizations are eager to register young voters, so they often have booths up in public spaces on campus to help you get registered (and are always giving away free stuff!). Go to that extra effort to be a first-timer and you’ll feel invested in your country’s politics and future to a whole new degree.

So for those of you who feel apathetic the way I did, I urge you to reconsider this year. There’s just too much at stake to sit idly by — and this time, your vote just might make a heck of a difference.

Love in the Novel

Nabokov

Intro to Buddhist Thought

These are the kind of classes my parents put up with throughout my college career, with nary an Econ class to be found among the lot.

Many students feel a lot of pressure, however, to take classes that will turn around into the best profit. They know their parents are dropping some major Benjamins to keep them in a good school, and they want to return the favor by, at the very least, not making their parents go gray worrying that their children will be living in a box on the street. So they take Econ and finance classes. They try to become good little doctors and lawyers and I-bankers.

But most of the people I know taking that path aren’t particularly happy doing it.

Sometimes I begin to feel that creeping Slacker Guilt. You know, the worry that I’m only taking lightweight courses that won’t lead to a career. That I’m squandering my parents’ money, happily off dancing through English and artsy-fartsy classes. I begin to feel like maybe I should just put my head down and grind through a few teeth-gritting courses like Decision-Making in Finance, just so I won’t feel like I’ve got my head in the clouds all the time. I see other english majors being struck with Slacker guilt, too. Creative writers taking on extra-burdensome course loads and classes that have bad professors and uninspired reading lists, just because they think they should.

It just doesn’t….fit.

I know that it makes sense to take these “practical” courses, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. College is about exploring new things and learning the things you want to learn. Sure, it is also about working towards a career, but if you don’t like what you are studing in Econ 101, you are not going to like working for a large finance firm for the next 60 years (or until it goes under). Especially if you only did it to appease the parentals.

I’m proposing a bold new interpretation of the keep-the-parents-happy rule. Above all, your parents want you to be happy. Honestly, it seems to me that life’s too short to waste twenty or more years of it on a career path that makes you groan inside. There is a better life out there, doing something you feel passionate and excited about. Even if it means making a few less bucks, I say go for it.

At the very least, spend your college years being excited by your classes. You can do the more practical stuff later. Med schools like admitting English majors, honestly, because they’re well-versed in the world and they know how to write, which is an invaluable skill in just about any profession. So take a little joy in your education, and worry about paying the bills just a little bit later.

And it couldn’t be further from reality for many others, which is why many students opt for the sweet, glorious single.

At Princeton, singles are rarely occupied by freshmen, but they’re the absolute hottest real estate for older, wiser sophomores, juniors, and seniors. I’m surprised by how many freshmen claim they would never want a single and then end up wishing they had one by the end of the year. Here are a few reasons why you should consider the sweet single life for next year.

Odds are your roommate will not be your BFF.

While my roommate and I didn’t have any major clashes, we were from different worlds and ended up parting ways at the end of the year without staying in touch. And this was the case for most of my friends. Don’t worry about missing out on a close friend by gettin’ your own place; your closest friends will be the people who share your interests and activities, not your sleeping space. And there’s no chance of having those worst-case scenario roommates you so often hear about. You know the ones: the guys and gals who leave moldy food under the bed, get in crying fits on the phone at 3am, want to hold wild room parties every weekend, or leave their alarms set for five in the morning and just. keep. hitting. the snooze. for hours.

Sleep and wake up on your own schedule.

Sleep at college is very important. You’ll be working furiously hard most of the time, and when you’re not, you’ll want to sleep. With a single, you can go to bed at 4am without having to work with a flashlight under the sheets because roomie wants to get to bed at nine, and you don’t have to wake up at 5am to the sound of your early-rising roomie’s alarm. Yay for your own sleep schedule!

Work without distractions.

I’ll look for any excuse not to work, and if someone else is there, I have someone to talk to and a reason to stop my Psych reading. Having a single means I have fewer ways to procrastinate. Freshman year, I had to make the long cold trek to the library; with a single, my room is always a cozy study space with all of my creature comforts around me.

You can do…private stuff.

Having a single is obviously hugely advantageous if you have a boy/girlfriend and you’d like a little private time. If you are both feeling suddenly amorous, you don’t need an elaborate system of ties on doors and the like to get the time you want. Besides that, it’s just nice to come back to a room that’s all your own. You can do all those things you wouldn’t do in front of other people (like, say, testing out one of these), with no fear of someone bursting in on you. And that’s the sweetest thing of all.

I remember in my senior year of high school, one girl was found to have plagiarized part of a paper from the internet. Not only was she suspended; she had to deliver a speech in front of the entire class, explaining why plagiarism was wrong.

Princeton has been particularly aggressive on the cheating front in the same way. We have honor code meetings, have to write a page on matriculation illustrating our understanding of it, and get regular updates from the honor committee. All the same, when I arrived there I discovered whole new layers of gray areas.

In problem set classes, for example, there are plenty of people who like to work in study groups. That’s all well and good, except when “study groups” turn into “let’s just copy the answers off each other.” I thought that kind of behavior was only in the occasional math class, but I was surprised to learn that it’s much more prevalent in college. When all that matters for your future career is that good grade in an Orgo class, it can be extremely tempting just to write down the process and answer of your friends, whether you understand it or not, and worry about the final exam later.

I’m not taking a holier-than-thou position on this, either. I’m just lucky I’m not tempted in my classes. As an English major, I don’t have much opportunity to enter the grey area of cheating short of blatant plagiarism, which offends my sensibilities as a writer. I’m curious how fellow students feel about the study group phenomenon, however. When the chips are down in a really tough class with a really tough grader, would you copy the answer of a friend on a problem set?

I have friends who specifically take the classes of people they know just so they can hit them up for answers on a regular basis. I find it disturbing, but I also acknowledge that not every college class is going to reach the ideal of “I just take it to learn!” Some classes are a grind and are meant to be endured rather than enjoyed. But how far will today’s college student go to endure them?

Last year I was on the receiving end of some of the grey area-cheating. I took a class with a friend that was heavy on the paperwriting. I was accustomed to this, but my friend wasn’t. He took to sending me drafts the night before the deadline, pleading for revision help. On a couple of occasions, I gave revision suggestions. Then I told myself that enough was enough, and I wouldn’t do it anymore. I don’t think giving revision help is cheating at all; it’s not giving any direct answers, and at Princeton you can get revision help from the teachers right up until the day the paper is due. But it still made me cautious about how much help to offer.

Nowadays, with the ease of the internet, it seems like the grey area of cheating or plagiarism has expanded hugely, and the good ole-fashioned honor code is struggling to keep up.

Where do you draw the line?

[Photo courtesy of reviewjournal.com]

This year’s Beijing Olympics are possibly the most politicized Olympics to go down on the planet in decades. It’s always ugly when politics enter into something supposed to be as pure an ideal as the excellence of sport, but the polluted skies over Beijing aren’t the only source of dirt and grime these days.

Everyone knows about the furious and polarizing debates and protests over Tibet. It’s hardly news anymore that there are monks on the march, and Chinese police cracking down on them. What I find even more disturbing, however, is the crushing influence of the Chinese government over people’s free speech. When so-called public opinion polls emerge saying that over 90% of all Chinese people are wholeheartedly in favor of every aspect of the Chinese government, as I’ve been reading about in the New York Times, you know something’s wrong.

No country likes their government that much, unless they’re too frightened to say differently. And now, this strong tendency to crack down on opposing opinions has gone one step further: it entered the olympics.

Princeton student Joey Cheek, class of 2011, a world champion speed skater and former Olympian (who was only going to the Olympics to support his team) has had his visa revoked by the Chinese government. The reason? Cheek is an outspoken activist for the genocide in Darfur, and has been critical of China’s many investments in the Sudan. Cheek had no intention of bringing his politics to the arena, but the Chinese government won’t tolerate any opposition, including the mere possibility. Meanwhile, the official dudes of the Olympic committee are refusing to defend the student, basically saying it’s out of their jurisdiction.

So much for the spirit of the Olympics.

I always used to think that cities were granted the privilage of hosting the Olympics for good behavior — having a well-developed nation with well-cared for citizens and a clear position supporting human rights and all that good stuff. Hence, the olympics that I’ve seen in my lifetime have all taken place in relatively developed nations — the U.S., Italy, Greece, Australia, and the upcoming Great Britain.

China, however, still has many troubling issues to address in terms of its position on human rights. Why has it been given the gift of the Olympics if it’s still bullying anyone who speaks critically of it? Here’s hoping the coming Olympics will be a showcase of athletic prowess and not governmental might.