Commitment issues are spreading through Whitman like an STD, with one situationship after another infecting the campus. It can start from a simple Tinder swipe, a drunken conversation at a party, or even trying to convince someone to vote for you during an ASWC General Election. You meet someone who you think is your type, but with summer being only six days away (or in some cases six months), your first thought isn’t “I want to take this person out to dinner,” it’s “I want to Snap them for the next month, get to know them casually, and never have to commit.”

This isn’t going to turn into a traditional friends with benefits situation, where you are simply two friends who are hooking up –this is a situationship, where one or both of you catches feelings, but one or both of you have commitment issues. 

This is when things get contagious. Not only do you catch feelings but you vocalize them, and not only are they not reciprocated, but the other person starts sleeping with someone else. Then, to even the playing field, you sleep with someone else. 

Once you hit this point, you are no longer trying to find a cure for the other person’s commitment issues but embrace your own. You notice the change when someone new walks by, someone who’s older and wiser and maybe even speaks Italian, unlike your other situationship, who does not know or mind that you’re already in this new bed. Conveniently, you’re all on the same page since all three of you know about each other, and none of you care because all three of you have the same disease.

Statistically, men are more likely to catch these commitment issues and fall into an endless cycle of nonexclusive situationships, as it encourages the longstanding tradition of men being emotionless.

According to an anonymous source, “You know what the best part about being a man is? If a girl likes you enough, you don’t have to lie to her; she’ll lie to herself.”

It was thanks to this mantra that the anonymous source later turned a casual conversation with a hopeless romantic into a nonexclusive situationship, who (after the situationship ended in three months) caught the commitment issues herself.

There is no cure for the emotional immaturity that has spread through the school. Once you have caught it from one person, it sticks with you for longer than a therapist can and is written in the fine print of your Whitman degree.