Bring Back the Magic!
Can old college traditions save romance?
“Love is one of those bonds which enable people to function and societies to flourish.” — Thomas Sowell, 1996
I recently came across a disturbing statistic. Marriage rates have dropped for the last 40 years.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it wasn’t until I saw charts beautifully rendered by data science guru Dr. Randal Olson did I fully appreciated the danger. Olson compiled marriage and divorce rates from a century and a half of data from the CDC National Center for Health Statistics. As shown below in a subset of his data, marriage rates (and the parallel divorce rates) have been in steady decline since their peak in the 1970s and 80s.
Everyone seems to have an explanation for this drop, typically citing economic, demographic, and social factors. The Congressional Joint Economic Committee suggests that our aging population has moved more people out of the “prime age” for marriage. The non-partisan Brookings Institute suggests that growing economic inequality, particularly in male wages, are associated with lower female marriage rates. Jay Zagorsky, an economist at The Ohio State University, suggests that not only is the drop due to income and wealth inequality, but also to other social factors, including a steady decrease in religious attendance, increase in women’s education and income (allowing them to be choosier about their prospects), and a general attitude that marriage is an outdated tradition.
Frankly, they all miss the real reason: Romance has lost its pizazz.
The decline of romantic love in America appears to have begun in the late 1990s. An article in Psychology Today reported that many millennials are, “avoiding serious relationships as they may involve love.” And in 1995, Kay Hymowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “if love in America is not dead, it is ailing.” She posited that intense emotions, such as love, grief, and jealousy went against “American cool,” direct opposition to the kind of personal detachment desired by young people. College students and 20-somethings, she observed, appeared to be most anti-love, apt to describe relationships as friendships with little or no reference to romance or commitment.
In other words, to quote the J. Geils Band, “Love stinks.”
Now, some may challenge that the future is not so bleak. A Monmouth University Poll earlier this Spring showed that among Americans who are currently married or in a romantic relationship, 59% are extremely satisfied with their relationship, a number that has remained steady in national polls for the last six years. Promising as this is, I can’t help but wonder if mere satisfaction during a pandemic is the same as excitement and romance during the best of times.
I believe that once this pandemic finally breaks, we desperately need to bring back romance, not with science, not with data, but with magic and mystique. We need to look at the romantic traditions of yore.
Colleges, not surprisingly, provide some of the best romantic traditions. Most of these date back to the early part of the 20th century when curfews and social mores challenged young love. Young men and women had to get creative, finding places to meet after dark or (gasp) steal a kiss. Rendez-vous took place at locales equidistant from the men’s and women’s dorms, and pretexts were manufactured for the meet-ups. Over time, these meeting places took on the trappings of legend and transformed from basic map coordinates to enchanted ground.
Examples abound. The Kissing Rock at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is a popular destination for lovers; folklore states that a woman is supposed to kiss any man found occupying the space around the magical stone. The Old Pump, at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, dates back to the early days of the university, when a law forbade ladies from attending dates on weeknights, and a curfew was strictly enforced. The old water pump was situated conveniently next to the ladies’ quarters, and young lovers would find reasons to sneak out past curfew under the guise of getting water. The Kissing Tree, at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, is a meeting place dating back to the days when kissing in public was strictly forbidden. It is said that teachers and administrators would only look the other way if a student was standing under the tree.
Some legends add enchantment and prophecy to the mix, typically with rituals connecting lovers as soulmates forever. For example, at the Engineering Arch at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, lovers will become kindred spirits if they kiss each other under the arch at midnight. There’s the Passion Puddle at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, where legend says that if a male student from Cook College and a female student from Douglas College hold hands and walk around the water three times, they will be married. Or even the Oval Walk at The Ohio State University in Columbus, where the couple needs to walk hand in hand across the oval during the ringing of the Orton Tower Bells with no one crossing their path for their love to last forever.
I am most familiar with the legend of the Rose Well House at Indiana University at Bloomington, largely because IU was my alma mater. The Well House was built way back in 1908 to surround the old cistern pump. It was named after chairman Theodore F. Rose because he funded the project out of his own pocket, patterning the 8-sided structure on his Beta Theta Pi fraternity pin. This beautiful, gothic-looking building on the north edge of Dunn Woods, sits in the most picturesque part of campus. After its construction over a century ago, it quickly became a popular meeting place for romantic encounters, since it was equidistant between the men’s and women’s dormitories. In fact, a woman was said to be a “true coed” only after kissing her beau through the 12 strokes of midnight, a risky endeavor since the women’s curfew was 11pm. It was, to say the least, scandalous.
As time moved on and social mores changed, so did the legend. Now it is said that if you kiss someone in the Rose Well House through the 12 strokes of midnight, they will be your romantic partner for life.
Unfortunately, by the time I was a college student in the late 1980s, the legend had diminished to an obscure ritual. I recently asked many of my old college buddies for their stories about the Well House, and I was greatly disappointed.
Most had never heard of the legend. One woman admitted that she didn’t even know where the Well House was, since she rarely frequented that part of campus. It was only upon taking her own daughter on an official tour of IU that she heard the legend. My sister, who attended the same college five years after me, was floored by the story. “I literally never heard of the Well House or that tradition before,” she said. “I’m pretty sure neither did anyone I know, because trust me, there would have been plenty of opportunities for people to use it.”
A few had heard the legend but never acted on it. My good friend Harry (not his real name), met his wife at IU. He said to me, “We knew about it while we were at school. Sally’s comment was, ‘I think I suggested we kiss there, you said it was stupid, so we didn’t do it.’ That sounds pretty accurate.” He added, “but at our last visit to IU, we grossed out our daughters by kissing there.” Amazingly, these two are still happily married.
Only one friend, eight years my senior, offered up his own incredibly romantic story from his sophomore year. It involved a young lady he knew vaguely from one of his classes who sat next to him at a viewing of the movie The Graduate at the Student Union. He said that from the time the movie started, they were both drawn into the story that was, at their age, all too close to home. When the movie ended, they just sat there trying to process the experience. After the movie they walked hand in hand in silence to the Well House, where they reveled in the quiet autumn air and cuddled together until sunrise. In the morning, he chastely escorted her back to her dorm with nothing more than a simple good-bye. They never spoke of that evening again, but he said that night — that moment — was his transition to maturity. “Why? I guess sitting with a girl I barely knew until sunrise gave me the feeling I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.”
I was so touched by this deeply personal story that I vowed to keep it completely confidential. He assured me that as long as his name stayed out of it, I was welcome to it. “To me, the Well House was minor. The 50-yard line at both 10th street and Memorial stadiums, THOSE were memories!”
My own Well House story was quite a bit different. I started dating my wife thirty-four years ago this October, my freshman year in college. She was the one who told me about the legend. Clearly, she listened to the orientation tours much better than I did. We often joked about heading out to the Well House to “become co-eds”, but it never happened our freshman year, nor sophomore year, nor junior year. Senior year we discussed it again, but somehow the plans never materialized. Finally, the very last night of finals, we decided to head out to the Well House to fulfill the ritual as undergrads.
So that evening, around a quarter to midnight, we walked to the Well House feeling a little self-conscious. We had hoped to have the structure to ourselves, but there was already another couple there, also looking somewhat self-conscious. We took up positions on opposite sides of the shelter, acknowledged each other with a “hey,” and tried to ignore each other’s presence. Another couple arrived shortly after, followed by another, and another, and another. Clearly, we were not the only procrastinators in college.
As more and more people arrived, the mood changed. Instead of an intimate experience, the Well House took on a party atmosphere, all of us laughing and joking with each other. At about two minutes to midnight, I counted everyone and discovered we had nineteen couples. Nineteen couples in a space the size of a small dance floor. Someone commented how cool it would be to get an even 20. With about 30 seconds to midnight, a final couple sheepishly strolled toward the Well House with 38 people cheering them on, whooping and hollering, yelling for them to hurry up.
And then, as the clock struck midnight, my wife and I shared a long kiss through the full 12 chimes of the bell, trying to ignore all the giggling going on around us.
I’ve often thought back to that night. My wife and I have been married for 28 years, which, if I may say so, is pretty impressive. We’ve been together through sickness and health, economic downturn, prosperous high times, job changes, refinanced mortgages, children, aging parents, and all the other trappings of life. Here’s the wild thing; we still really like each other. Not just love. Not just commitment. We actually like each other.
Did we last this long because we fulfilled a college ritual? Was the ritual a self-fulfilling prophecy? Or was it just college shenanigans that had nothing to do with our future?
I am convinced that romantic rituals have practical merit. To maintain a 45-second kiss through all 12 chimes of midnight requires intense focus. It requires a couple to forget about the distractions of the world around them and completely commit to each other. This is not casual flirtation, wild unfocused sex, or childish make-out sessions. This is holding your breath and showing your lover that you are in it for the long haul. If there is a better metaphor for a shared life, I can’t think of one.
Or maybe, just maybe, there was some magic in that Well House after all.
