“Good evening. Due to multiple people divorcing and remarrying…”
It’s the end of July, and I’ve just received this email in my inbox. Some friends showed surprise, and some saw it for what it was: the inevitable result of encouraging freshers into a long-term commitment within only a few weeks of knowing each other, only to inherit ‘children’ and a pressure to avoid being part of a broken home’. Welcome to the (college) family.
Not a phenomenon unique to Oxford, ‘academic families’ at St Andrews, where first years are adopted by third years in their first term, existed as early as the 1980s. While traditions can vary, the ethos behind it is clear to see. College parents are there to do some much-needed hand-holding in the time running up to and during their child’s first Michaelmas, answering all kinds of questions (no, you don’t need that wok). And when the time comes, first years find the person or people (we don’t judge polyamory here) they want to ‘marry’ and the cycle continues.
Like many aspects of Oxford life, the college family feels peculiar when examined from the outside – yet makes perfect sense to everyone who participates in it. Coming home after my first term for the Christmas vac, I was faced, inevitably, with an abundance of questions about the system: how are college parents assigned, how do you know who to marry, and from my confused and slightly concerned grandma – “you’re not actually getting married, are you?”. I answered each one with a level of confidence and faith in the system which could be considered slightly strange for someone who had only been attending Oxford for just over a month.
But the similarities between college families and actual families go further. The college family is as dynamic as any blood family. Clashing personalities and sibling rivalry, awkward encounters with your college great-uncle, absent fathers… Oxford students (yes, probably you) are often perfectionists, and my naïve visions of a ‘perfect’ family life, such as meeting parents for coffee, venting about deadlines and so on, soon fizzled out. The saying ‘you can’t choose your family’ had never been more true.
Yet if each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, Oxford students are alike in their happy approval of the college family system. A snap poll at St John’s College for Cherwell found that the college family system continues to be exceedingly popular, despite the emotional labour involved. While nearly two thirds of freshers surveyed thought the system was “pretty weird”, this did not stop 94% saying it was a good thing, overall.
Just as in real life, ‘families’ are something which you find and form of your own accord, and are not always the people you inherit. A college family can look however you want it to look, and a college marriage is a special kind of friendship which is forged in adversity (read: weeks 5 and 6). This is the beauty of the system.
There are bound to be awkward moments. It could be anything from an ill-advised night out, a joint costume for a bop gone wrong, to a Freudian intra-family crush. In a regular friendship devoid of a faux-marriage contract, these issues, while painful at the time, can often be overcome without too many unwanted consequences. This is not the case with the Oxford college marriage.
It’s all too obvious that the idea places pressure on freshers to cement themselves in committed platonic relationships too soon. There is a concerted effort to find someone ‘before all the good ones are gone’. 46% of 2nd years met their spouse in a non-clubbing freshers week event and 30% of incoming freshers surveyed said they would also be on the lookout for a partner during freshers week. Much like an early marriage, when the initial infatuation (for Oxford, if not for your partner) has worn off, one or both parties realise that they might have made the wrong choice. When you bring children into the equation, the stakes can increase further.
But perhaps it’s exactly this kind of hurried, in-at-the-deep-end way of going about things which is so quintessentially Oxford. After all, it’s an institution known for its lengthy reading lists, scary deadlines, and short but intense terms, after which you often feel like you’ve lived multiple lives rolled into one. The idea of surviving all of that without at least someone to grumble to before an early morning lecture, or over a pint in the college bar, is practically impossible.
