Dating Outside the Humanities

It was a radical idea.

Everyone I knew at Harvard had always dated the same kinds of people: Classics concentrators, Hist & Lit boys, the occasional social theorist. My female friends had converged on an ideal type. Emaciated and elusive: the Humanities Heartbreak. By senior year, everyone was getting tired of this—even our parents.

“The next time you see a skinny, neurotic boy,” my friend’s mother advised, “don’t date him.”

Could people like us find love outside the humanities? To freshmen, this question may seem ludicrous. But wait until you actually have a concentration. You will be forced to learn the habits of your discipline: the code words, the inside jokes. You’ll still be able to talk to people from different disciplines, but it may be a struggle.

Humanities concentrators have it the worst; sometimes it bothers them that they don’t study facts. Being in the humanities myself, I decided to investigate the question, “Should one date outside the humanities?” in the most rigorous possible way.

I talked to some people I knew in order to draw broad conclusions about the human condition—or, at least, the human condition at Harvard.

“They’re intimidating,” one of my historian friends said, when asked why he had never dated a scientist. There were the logistical issues, of course: their long hours in the lab, their multiple problem sets, all precluded the possibility of his getting to know girls in the sciences.

And scientists get so uppity, he said, just because the questions they ask always had answers. “They think you’re full of crap,” he said. The English concentrator sitting with us was dating an engineer. “He doesn’t like books,” she said.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t find examples of interdisciplinary dating at Harvard. But it was rare. Okay, the economists got around—but the social sciences were inherently promiscuous. They didn’t count. Love across real disciplinary boundaries, bringing together scientists and humanists: that was hard to find.

And the phenomenon, I discovered, wasn’t limited to undergraduates.

Harvard’s 12 residential houses are led by 12 academic couples, and there’s little interdisciplinary mixing among them. Kirkland House masters: both Romance Languages and Literatures. Lowell’s house masters: both Religion.

Adams House masters Sean and Judith Palfrey: both doctors, both specializing in pediatrics. Sean Palfrey laughed at me when I asked him about love between disciplines, but he said there were definite advantages to a relationship with someone who really understands you. “I think it helped us in medical school,” he told me. “Out of 12 couples going into medical school, we were the only couple to survive.”

Interdisciplinary love seemed doomed.

What if you’re arguing with your biologist boyfriend, and you tell him, “Wait a minute. I think we’re trapped in an oppressive discourse”—and he has no idea that you’re talking about Foucault? Or what if your mathematician boyfriend slips his arm around your shoulders and says, “Hey, I think we need to reduce your genus by one?” Do you laugh, or do you dump him? Communication: kind of a bid deal.

And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about that final leap: leaving the humanities dating pool forever. No more square glasses. No more jokes about Simone de Beauvoir.

The English major who was dating the engineer seemed cheerful. “I think in some ways dating outside the humanities fulfils the purpose of the Core Curriculum,” she told me.

I started telling my friends to stop pining for awkward poets and start hanging out in the buildings we usually avoid.

Which might or might not explain how I ended up at the Miracle of Science Bar & Grill. I was sitting across from a condensed matter theorist. Instead of gloves, he was wearing socks on his hands. I decided to ignore that.

Our conversation was going okay. He didn’t compare me to a infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. It seemed almost normal. Then he grabbed my coffee cup. “It’s a caustic,” he said, peering into it.

“A what?” I said.

“It kind of looks like a butt,” he told me.

He was pointing to a faint pattern on the surface of the coffee—a double curve where light hit the liquid.

“Has that always been there?” I said. How had I missed it? I was a writer. I was supposed to notice things.

“Yup,” he said. He moved the cup around. “See? It’s still there.” I looked at him, bemused. I looked back down at the coffee.

“What’s it called?” I asked. “That shape?”

“Nephroid,” he said.

I tiled the cup and watched the pattern change.

“Huh,” I said.

I was thinking, funny, it’s almost Valentine’s Day.