Call Your Girlfriends

Will Beddick

I never really understood why it was hard to find love in a city, especially one like Pittsburgh which has many universities. I finally decided to enter the dating scene here a few months ago and boy, is it a marathon. I’ve realized that finding love in this city is not my problem; it’s finding someone who wants a relationship. Rivaling with passing organic chemistry with an A or surviving sorority recruitment with your identity intact, finding someone who might just want to maybe, possibly start a relationship with you is impossible.

I had this conversation with my girlfriends repeatedly, and we all attempted to answer the same question: is love dead in Pittsburgh? It left me thinking for days and I finally came up with an answer: sort of. Now, that sounds like a cop-out, but hear me out! I find that the love I am searching for is too hard to ask of a college man. We are only so young and in my experience, a college man doesn’t want to find the head-over-heels love of his life. Rather, he wants to find someone that could have interest in him and then once you display that interest, he freezes up and calls it quits, leaving you and your dignity thrown into the trash like a SPAM email. 

Even worse are the dating apps, you see a guy you think is cute and he has in his dating intentions “Short-term relationship, open to long” or even worse than that, “Long-term relationship, open to short,” which both sound promising. But, most of the time, they’re not. Instead, they are just words on a screen without the intention of actually meaning much. Entering the dating world is being thrown into the biggest game of catfish, but with words, not pictures. Anyone can say anything they want on their profiles and if you are new to the dating scene like I was, you’re going to believe it all. I believed everything and anything a man told me about their life or their intentions. God, I even believed a man when he told me that he still liked me after he said he wasn’t exclusive with only me. Was I wrong to believe that? Absolutely.

My experience with love (or lack thereof) in Pittsburgh has been a convoluted one. Every time my trust is betrayed, I am brought back to the same starting point: is love dead in Pittsburgh? Now, I can only speak on my experiences– as a man looking to date other gay men–but it is eerily similar to that of my girlfriends seeking out straight men. In fact, a girlfriend of mine was detailing to me her past situationship and how it went from the obsession–the texting every day, the asking how your day was, the getting to know her roommates, and the meeting of his friends and hers–to complete radio silence. How is it that a beautiful, intelligent woman like her can get stood up by a man who in fact, started it all? 

Even worse, another girlfriend of mine was recently victim of a love bomber: one who showers you with constant love, affection, and adoration to ultimately gain control of you and the relationship. Once she ended things with him, he was quickly back on the dating apps to find his next person to assail. This is exactly how both cases, the obsessor and the love bomber, can get you and your emotional stability wrapped around their fingers. Right when you display interest, it’s game over and you are thrown back into the sea of eligible bachelors, drowning as each wave is thrown your way.

So where do we go from here as young adults joining or still stuck in the dating pool? Is love really dead in Pittsburgh? When entering (or drowning in) the dating pool, you should remember these three things: protect your peace, have fun with it, and always make sure to listen to your girlfriends (or your boyfriends if they are at all competent to the issue, which is rare I might add). We are only this young once, so make the most of it. Now go and call your girlfriends, they can probably relate to this one too. 

Edited by Ruby Kolik & Elisabeth Kay