My boyfriend and I are married!! For over two years now, wow – what a journey. At 20, some could say it’s a bit premature.
But when it’s a college marriage, it’s a bit less serious. It is a situation only possible at Oxbridge, where my boyfriend is both my boyfriend and my husband. We got married on the 8th October 2022 at a college drinks event, five days after we’d arrived in Oxford.
We got married before we’d even kissed, which is an unusual path for a couple to take, though not too unusual for a college marriage. I even turned down someone else to marry him. Picky, I know. I seem to have taken the college marriage system as seriously as an actual relationship, which, luckily, is an attitude that fate has justified.
If my relationship had gone wrong, my college marriage would be in shambles. That wouldn’t matter if a college marriage wasn’t an actual relationship. If you’re at Brasenose, like we are, you have to cook dinner with your spouse in Freshers week for your children. If you hate each other, it’s hard to chat, let alone cook a meal together in a kitchen you’ve never used for people you’ve never met. For a year at least, you can’t escape your college spouse. That pressure-cooker, the famous Oxford ‘bubble’, is the only reason ‘cest’ in all its forms (not incest, come on) exists as an Oxford concept. Otherwise, what would be the problem? You marry a rando, maybe you kiss or more, and a year later, you cook dinner with them and talk about how much reading you have to do for Tort Law. Then you never see them again. To be honest, that is an option, if an awkward one. As long as you never see them in Quad. At a BOP. In Hall. Unlikely.
Firstly, can we have a suffix other than ‘cest’ please? It makes it sound way worse than it is. Colleges are not families. Those doing the same subject as you are not your family. Even ‘college families’ aren’t proper families, not blood families, not even chosen families. This is people who have things in common, in close proximity getting together, which is surely how most people… get together?
Where to find love in Oxford? People ask. Surely it’s close to home, in the groups you’ve already formed, the friendships, the… college families?
Yes, stuff gets messy. But the reason ‘oxcest’ exists seems, to me, to be driven by the fear of a relationship falling apart.
Granted, it’s much harder to extricate yourself if the relationship collapses in Oxford due to that aforementioned bubble. If you’re looking for someone to have casual sex with, your tute partner is probably an unwise choice. So, maybe ‘oxcest’ is a good rule if you have a history of casually getting with friends and subsequently losing friendships.
But if you’re looking for something more serious, consider loving thy neighbour. You’ll be taking a chance, yes, but isn’t all love a risk?. I think you’ll be less likely to find love if you’re riddled with the fear of a relationship failing. Approaching love with the anticipation of regret cannot set you up for success.
The worry of later extrication is fair enough, but that painful undoing is part and parcel of living in a community, the beautiful benefits of which I think highly outweigh the disadvantages. You would always have to undo the lives you’ve built, even if your partner wasn’t originally in your community. Any kind of ‘uni-cest’ is an intensification of the gamble you take in all relationships.
Love is a losing game, they say, but not if you WIN!
Of course, I would say that. I took a gamble that paid off. We are thoroughly intertwined; we stay in the same college room, but don’t tell my scout. My in-college, in-friendship-group boyfriend has been my boyfriend for over two years since the fateful MT22 Halloween BOP. It’s just a cute fact about us, that we’re married. If our relationship had gone otherwise, maybe it would have been perilous. But I’d like to hope that even if our relationship had gone wrong, if we’d broken up right in the middle of our degrees, that the pain wouldn’t be so great that I regret it ever happened. A life anticipating regret cannot be one lived in joy.
So proceed with excitement. The world is wide but our circles are small. By all means, bring new people into your orbit, but do not disregard – through fear, arbitrary rules, and unnecessarily serious college small talk – those you already love, living in your own world.
