Last term, I began my second year here at Oxford, and my first in Cherwell. I distinctly recall the elation I felt while I waited for the onboarding meeting to start, sitting at a battered wooden canteen table in the verdant lobby of a hostel I was staying at in central Berlin. The meeting began with slides detailing our roles as part of the paper, and there was a brief mention of the blind dating section, Cherpse, which needed someone to run it. I figured between that and the Agony Aunt, vicarious involvement in people’s dire dating lives sounded far more amusing. Although it was certainly not how I envisioned my very, very serious career in journalism starting, I was determined to make the most of it; after all, I’ve always felt there’s something about the odd Oxford dating scene that’s worth investigating (what with my entire friendship group’s 0% dating success rate, despite us being what I’d consider a very normal bunch of people.)
Sunday of week zero rolled around soon enough. Armed with a trench coat – worn frequently enough to expose my unfulfilled investigative student journalist fantasy to the entire student body – I was ready for a rigorous term of intense matchmaking, poem writing, diplomacy work, Oxfess mentions, and dating scene analysis.
Now, having exhausted myself with these relentless pursuits, the job has been passed on to a new bright-eyed Cupid, and in my retirement I’ve become fondly reflective, and decided to curate my insights into this list:
- Next to nobody wants to date union hacks and rowers. That said, I have a friend who said she’ll occasionally agree to go for coffee with a hack just to feel like she’s going on a date.
- Don’t be shy to sign up for a blind date. The people are generally very normal; only one person requested someone with a ‘massive c*ck’. Not sure how they expected me to know that… my passion for investigative journalism certainly doesn’t extend that far.
- Corpus is the illuminati of Oxford. It’s a college no one’s ever been to, but if you look closely there’s definitely an underground network of Corpuscles running the University, and I fear my work has only entrenched this. Maybe having no grass in your front quad will do that to students.
- There’s a concerning amount of third and fourth years who are willing to date freshers. At one point I had to start recruiting non-first years to match up with all the sharks in my (Google) sheets. Shameless.
- Your chances of being set up with the president elect of OUCA are slim, but never zero. Especially if you’re one of the co-chair elects of OULC. According to her, it was ‘not exactly a love match, but definitely a plot twist’ – a plot twist indeed, as she was expecting a woman but discovered that her blind date was with OUCA’s male pres elect. Still, he informed me that they’ve organised a joint event in Trinity, so I guess I can list ‘Diplomat’ underneath ‘Cupid’ on my Linkedin.
- Poetry is the best way to entice people to do anything – especially attend a blind date. Having spent many hours crafting couplets, it would seem I’ve mastered the art of rhetorical poetry. Although Walt Whitman claimed that ‘The greatest of thoughts and truths are never put into print’, clearly I did what he could not – my poems not only provided the much needed spark of romance for Oxford’s lovebirds, but also solidified my legacy as the Michaelmas ‘24 Cupid.
I hope these insights are as valuable to you as they have been to me. I can’t recommend being an anonymous, irrelevant third wheel to over 50 couples enough – really. Although I have come away with even less faith that I will ever find a partner here, it’s nice to know we’re all having the same experience.
