…and I’m noticing that there are about 8 students per table. The boys sit with the boys. The girls sit with the girls.
ONE table so far has a mix of sexes. It’s startling. By the age of 18-22, there’s still precious little socializing between the sexes in a setting as banal and routine ( 3 meals a day ) as a cafeteria at a small university?
Color me surprised.
I lived with housemates. My college had no dorms, and while I did spend one rather glorious year living on campus illegally at Sarah Lawrence College with a girlfriend, this kind of social dynamic isn’t something I got to experience.
Just strikes me as a bit weird. Weird? Sad? Unexpected.
When I went to college in the 80’s, I sat with a mixed group. I met my husband in the cafeteria this way. We’re still together. He’s another Doper. (Let’s see if he sees this thread!)
A few years ago, I worked at a Fortune 500 company that had a cafeteria/break room. And you know what? I noticed the exact same thing at lunch time - boys sat with the boys, girls sat with the girls. With only one exception that I can remember, even the married couples who worked there sat with their bros or sisters respectively.
We all take a LONG time to completely graduate from school, I guess.
Yeah, my social group was pretty mixed, although slanted a bit in favor of guys oddly enough. (Oddly because I hung out with the Theater People. You’d have thought we’d be gal heavy.)
ETA: Suburban Community College, outside Chicago, 1992-1994
Yeah, there was a bit of a gender divide at my university but the reason for it is because my college has two campus about 5 miles apart and all the men’s dorms are at one campus and all the women’s dorms are at the other. So, if I ate at the one dining hall, yeah, guys sat with guys but that’s because there really weren’t any girls unless they were with their boyfriends. And at the other campus, girls sat with girls because there weren’t any guys unless they were with their girlfriends. (This, of course doesn’t cover all the cases and there are always a number of men at the women’s campus eating for various reasons and vice versa.) I usually ate at the women’s dining hall, because that was the campus all my classes were on. And my dinner group was pretty mixed. Usual eating buddies included Adam, Phil, Pat, Ryan, Evan, Mason, Chris, Ben, Ben, Joey, Michael, Kurt, Nick, Jared, Shannon, Amanda, Amanda, Kate, Erin, Erin, Stephanie, Meghan, Alisa, Jaslyn, Jocelyn, Nikki, and Megan which is a pretty even mix. Some days I ate with all guys and some days all girls and some days it was mixed.
I was hoping this thread would be about my favorite dining hall game which was guessing how far along various relationships were based on how the couple was eating. Opposite sides of the table with a napkin to wipe the mouth after every bite of veggie heavy no dressing salad? Maybe 2 weeks. One tray, slumped together in a corner, maybe no silverware, just some pizza and some soda? At least a year.
We always sat with a mixed group when I was in college in the late 80s. We were floormates in a mixed dorm (single-sex rooms).
The entire two years I lived in that dorm, there was always at least one guy pining for one of the girls, but the guys were too chickenshit to actually ask the girls out, they just sort of mooned over the girls, who of course just wanted to be friends because they already knew the guys as friends. It was a huge distraction from both academics and a normal social life. Because of this experience I am going to recommend that my boys choose single-sex dorms, if those still exist.
This was often true of my gang when I was in college at an east coast liberal arts U in the early ought’s, though not always. We’d typically decide to eat and walk down to the caf together (as opposed to saying “meet you at dinner at 6:30”). Since dorms were segregated by sex by floor, it was easier to just go with guys from the floor than wait around for the girls upstairs to get a move on. As an upperclassmen I lived in an all guy house, so we’d most often go as a group of guys. Of course sometimes we’d meet up with female friends at the caf, or peel off to go sit with someone else once we got there, but most of the time it was us guys and maybe one or two girlfriends. Frankly, I’m not sure many girls would want to sit in on the conversations we typically had around dinner
Same all-girl thing at my first college. Except it was a women’s college, so we didn’t have much choice.
I didn’t live on campus at Purdue and I was a bit older than my classmates by that time, so I didn’t hang with them and I don’t know how they lunched/dined. When I took my first non-Navy job, the facility was predominantly male, so most of the tables were all guys. Depending on my mood, I’d either mix it up or hang with a couple of the girls. And now that I think of it, the tables were loooooooooong and seated dozens, so I guess technically, just about all were mixed eventually.
Agreed. IMHO when you live in coed dorms you also eat with a mixed group. Those people who, for whatever reason chose single sex dorms, ate in unmixed groups.
Mixed groups was the norm. (mid-late90s, South-eastern liberal arts college environment)
Huh. The tables were always mixed (by all the characteristics I can think of) at my dining hall. However, houses were assigned certain tables in the dining hall. With 40 people assigned to three tables, it would have been difficult to do a lot of segregating. This was a Midwestern liberal arts college in the early 90s.
Once you realize that girls fart and crack bad puns and listen to crappy music and are all around human, you may find that “women” are not actually just interchangable walking warm vaginas. They’re people you could get to know.
