I can no longer remember a time when “let’s get dinner” felt more like a beginning and less like a conclusion. Usually muttered after a group project or a walk after a shared class, this phrase is known by Penn students as the ultimate empty promise. For the new students who are still open to making genuine friends, this concept can be confusing. But as a senior, I’ve finally accepted what some students may deny: Penn students have a lot of friends, but not a lot of friendships.
We like to speak about Penn as a lonely place where we become too busy with recruiting and coursework to make friends. But Penn isn’t just a solitary place because students don’t have friends; sometimes they’re lonely because they have too many.
I’ve noticed that whenever I talk to someone here, they usually make a point to emphasize their abundance of friends. Last weekend, they got dinner with an old friend or drank at Smoke’s with four other people. Half the time, it can feel like the main motive of the conversation is proving to their classmates that they’re not in their dorm all day. Anywhere else, I would doubt anyone who claimed this level of popularity. But here, it’s rare to hear the opposite.
My problem does not stem from students’ attempt to make friends, but the non-attempt to create long-lasting friendships. Think of the first day of class: if someone isn’t there with a friend, they’re scrambling to find an acquaintance or stranger to befriend. By the end, they’ve asked for your number; maybe they want to hang out, but most likely they’re adding you to their personal collection of class friends. A college brochure might indicate classes to be the source of long-lasting friendship, but there’s nothing long-lasting in what is inherently transactional.
Here is where Penn’s friendship industrial complex comes into play. Instead of taking the time to form a few valuable and fulfilling friendships, Penn students make people into plans. The same way that they overcommit by interviewing for an eighth club, they overcommit by promising significant personal time with the 80th person. There are students here who have people for different parts of their lives, but they lack a consistent person for every part of their life. We should admit that sometimes the problem isn’t the absence of time, but the absence of motivation to invest time in becoming intimately familiar with someone.
Nevertheless, I can admit that Penn is not the kind of school where people get by on pure luck. Depending on someone’s choice of study, they can be more or less booked by a combination of class time, exam prep, and interviews. At Penn, maybe the difference between an A and B in a class is having the right study group, the right project partner, and the right discipline to know when to be alone. But we have this tendency to play up our sociality, so that sometimes none of us can tell the difference between students with friends and students with friendships.
And once everyone has received the memo, it’s pretty difficult not to internalize this one underlying concept: nobody else is alone, but me. Students might claim that this system works best for their schedule, but I would argue it’s this secret insecurity that underpins their actions, not optimization. See, we pride ourselves on being the school of self-starters, full of future CEOs, entrepreneurs, and leaders. But becoming this kind of person does not come without its drawbacks; a successful person can be the most connected person while simultaneously being the loneliest in the room. And in a school of future leaders, we become a school of lonely people.
Consequently, I’m not here to judge the person who has a thousand friends they can get dinner with on any given day, because even if nobody will admit it, we have all either been or tried to be those people at some point. Nobody wants to eat their gross food alone in the dining hall, and everybody wants to have weekend plans with someone. But the point should not be to add more people to your Google Calendar for the appearance of connection when taking the chance to learn about someone would do the actual job.
It’s easier said than done, but we shouldn’t be afraid to invest time in another person. It’s easy to get caught up in the fear of rejection and our lack of time, but it’s much more preferable to have a few close friendships than a hundred distant friends. You will not die if you ask to hang out with people outside of class or invite them over to your apartment. You might not be the person who has 20 people at your birthday dinner or 200 to invite to your housewarming, but you could be something better. You could be the person who says “let’s get dinner” and actually means it.
LINDSAY MUNETON is a College senior studying sociology from Bergenfield, N.J. Her email address is lmuneton@sas.upenn.edu.
