You Call That Exclusive?

The newest entrant into the feeding frenzy that is online dating is IvyDate, a site that promises to match people from the eight Ivy League schools as well as Oxford, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics. It does so under the pretense of connecting “exceptional singles.”  While we at The Crimson applaud the intentions of the site, we have to ask:  What exactly does it consider exceptional?

Merriam-Webster defines exceptional as “unusually good; outstanding.”  In that sense, we would like to pose the following question to our readers: Which part of this definition describes Yale? It doesn’t count if you just take “unusual,” or sometimes, “standing.”

After all, we Harvardians have long known that we are simply too good to date the majority of the people on earth and could hardly contain our initial excitement at the thought that there was finally a website to address our needs.  Unfortunately, IvyDate fails to exclude enough people.  With an acceptance rate that is rapidly approaching zero—or, as we like to think of it, “perfect exclusivity”—we simply shouldn’t have to deal with anything less than the choicest crop of the world’s finest institutions. IvyDate would do well, then, to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Really, folks. If this is supposed to be an exclusive service, why was Cornell included? This year’s U.S. News and World Report survey ranked this institution 15th on its list of top universities. This is indeed a slippery slope upon which we sit. If we let in number 15 now, what is stopping us from taking 151 later?  If we start letting in the riff-raff now, it won’t be long before we are on the same dating sites as students (we use the term loosely here) from such esteemed institutions as the University of Alabama.

As all sensible Harvard undergrads know, what we look for most in a partner is pedigree.  In the end, what is the purpose of marriage if not to secure our children a stronger, or even dual, legacy status? And what do we give them if, when they apply to college, we can say: “You know your mother still knows some people over at Dartmouth!”  How will we deal with the disappointed looks our children will give us every time their classmates at Andover bring up their own parents, who attended both Harvard and Yale? Tell them that Brown is a good school, too? Would anyone actually believe that?

IvyDate claims to cater to those “who value intellectual curiosity, love of learning, drive, and determination,” which is all fine and well for those who need to justify themselves with that sort of thing, but we don’t.  We know we are the best, and we aren’t afraid to say that we only want to date other people who fit that distinction. We could find intellectual curiosity in the University of Chicago if that’s what we were going for, but even the folks who created IvyDate knew well enough to leave them out of this.

In reality, as number one, it is indeed a step down to associate with anyone from any other university. But if we must, shouldn’t we be picky? In the end, however, these are just paltry concerns. We wouldn’t want to denigrate what will surely amount to a profound force for social cohesion.

Thank you, IvyDate, for attempting to address the societal need for relationships among the privileged—but next time, let’s see if we can come up with an even more inane definition of who the privileged really are.