Once I entered college, I finally had some agency over my life and activities. Getting my driver’s license gave me freedom to go where I wanted to. It was as if I had slipped my leash. However, unlike a dog let off its leash, I was expected to be equipped to make excellent important life choices without any practice. This was particularly difficult in the social realm.
College life in the 1960s was alcohol soaked. My mother was a non-drinker, and my father infrequently enjoyed a gin and tonic in the summer and the occasional glass of wine. Marijuana was just starting to move into the scene my last year in college, so I did not have drugs to contend with, just alcohol. In an odd way I was blessed to be so young when I entered college. The age to buy liquor in New Jersey was 21, so I was never legal until after I graduated. In neighboring New York, the legal age was 18. What little social life I enjoyed, it was mostly spent in New Jersey.
My freshman year I worked most weekends at the convent retreat house, so my activities were threaded into the occasional weekends when the nuns did not have a retreat scheduled and did not need my help.
As a product of an all-girls convent high school, I did not have the opportunity to interact with boys other than through my family. My all-girls school had very few coed events, and they were carefully choreographed. A busload of girls would be sent all dressed up to a nearby boys boarding school. Then, the social chairman arbitrarily matched the girls with blind dates from a group of boys from the boys’ school. These “dates” were often very disappointing. On the bus ride we usually took up a collection, a pot, that would be awarded to the girl who got the worst date. Being very young and socially awkward made me a front-runner for winning the pot. My quarter, the ante for the pot, would give me a nice return on my investment, but it did nothing for my self-image.
In junior high school grades, the school sponsored ballroom dancing classes. For these events, the girls lined up in chairs on one side of the gym and an equal-sized group of boys would sit on the other side of the gym. The dance instructor and her partner would demonstrate the dance steps. Then the dance instructor would select a partner for each girl by height and ability to practice the dance. I did learn to foxtrot, waltz, jitterbug and cha-cha – all dances rapidly fading into obscurity. One year I enjoyed going to church-sponsored monthly square dances. I enjoyed learning to square dance, but after one year my church stopped offering square dance nights much to my disappointment. In college and beyond I discovered that I really liked social dancing. What had been a chore to learn became fun.
Any function that was not school sponsored came with a whole lot of restrictive rules. My old-fashioned Italian father insisted that anyone I went out with even for a movie or a ballgame had to be first approved by my older brother and then by my parents. For all events that were not directly school sponsored, my brother was expected to tag along. He either went to the same event or brought along a date that he had chosen.
This was stifling and had a very dark side. It was not until I got to college that I realized that my brother had dwarfed my social life. One evening I ran into a fellow on campus who was a friend of my brother. During our brief conversation, he mentioned that he had always wanted to go out with me. I asked him why he didn’t because I would have enjoyed dating him. He told me that honestly my brother was like a dragon, and no one would go near his sisters for fear of angering the dragon. This squared with the awkward conversations that I had with my brother’s friends when they came to the house. I assumed that I was unattractive and uninteresting. This damaged my teenage self-image.
The dark side was that if my brother needed to fix up one of his friends, I could be immediately called into service. I remember going to several questionable parties with blind dates fixed up by my brother. I did not always like his friends, but there was a small measure of safety in that he would always be there if I needed him. Per his dictum, I was never to discuss the party or date other than to say that it was fun lest he cut me off from ever going out again with him.
Once I got to college my brother’s grip on my social life loosened. I carefully chose my own circle of friends. In hindsight I realize that my judgement was quite sound, for the only truly bad experiences I had in college were the result of following someone’s recommendation and not my own judgement.
In college, most of my dates were with fellows I met through my church or my participation in the model UN sponsored by Princeton. My church activities included a weekly bag lunch at the rector’s house on the men’s campus. It was open to commuting students from both men’s and women’s campuses. We also had a Thursday early morning service with breakfast afterward. I often went to this service, enjoyed a hot breakfast and got to my 8:00 a.m. class on time. There was also a Sunday evening prayer service followed by an evening meal. I often would study on campus Sunday afternoon to get ahead on my assignments, eat supper and go home ready to confront the week ahead. Over time I developed my own social network and grew to realize that I could and did make good decisions.
Over My Shoulder 