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Making love fun

The bells of St Mary’s toll and all too soon tenth week is upon us. And before the chimes can even ring out, I’m reaching for the chocolates and wine whilst indulging in a soppy film about romances that never can be, musing about my past conquests and flings of (insert week of particularly heightened moral decay)th week’s past. There are no two ways about it: Oxford is an environment which makes love hard. Endlessly scanning JSTOR articles and mindlessly thrashing a few sentences upon a page you hope make sense in the dead of night whilst your pull still languishes in your bed/pit is hardly conducive to a life-spanning romance. The best you can expect from your pull after that oh-so-wise mid-essay trip to cellar you decided to take is a fuck that doesn’t end with you being kicked out at 6am into the dark Oxford night, cursing the fact you live in North Oxford.

The question about love in the Ox that I still can’t answer at this point in my degree is this: why have romance when you can also have fun? I don’t mean (on the whole) ‘no strings attached’ shags. I mean something more akin to a rom-com; but without the shitness that comes with that deplorable genre of cinema.

The hopeless romantic within us (or at least us Humanities students) longs for the day someone pidges you a freshly written Petrarchan sonnet, complete with a bouquet of roses and marriage proposal written in beautiful calligraphy. But do you really want to live like a literary character? You may appreciate the heightened romanticism Flaubert crafts of the unfulfilled/disappointed love. But do you really want to work into the small hours searching hopelessly for a dissertation title, to be rewarded with nothing but a suggestive hand touch and furtive glances from across the Rad Cam like the readers of Madame Bovary? With but nine terms to find Mr/Ms/Dr right – I think not.

Being one of the many who have loved and lost, I can attest first-hand: being serious and forgetting the fun that can be had cannot go hand in hand if you wish for things to work. The advice I would give to incoming freshers is simple: university romance is a serious occurrence, but one that needn’t been taken so seriously. Who the fuck cares how long you’ll stay together, whether you will marry or the dowry arrangements the in-laws may be plotting in the background. We are young and living in the Oxford bubble. I want someone who will laugh at my terrible jokes and push me off my punt before grabbing me back and kissing me hard. I want to not feel my relationship is as serious as the crippling silence echoing around the Rad Cam in finals-season. There’s a time and place when love and bank statements meet; but uni is not that. Make loving fun and carefree whilst you still can.

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