The college campus is the last frontier of IRL romance. Love grows manically over canteen samosas and chai. Drama is spilled like chutney across corridors, hostel stairwells, and eventually on Instagram feeds. Everyone is available to date, even those still entangled with their school sweethearts. Before you know it, someone ends up in the emergency ward, drunk on phenyl, hoping to win back their loved one’s attention. Kids, I tell you.
But the highlight of it all was listening to a 20-year-old talk about the Activa rides she takes to college with her boyfriend. After being “friends” for one year and dealing with multiple situationships on the side, the second-year couple recently made things official on a date at the banks of the Ghaggar River in Panchkula. Imagine the boyfriend waiting outside her class, every day—she comes out hungry and bored to death, and he fixes everything by pulling out a chocolate from his bag. What’s not to love about campus romance?
And yet, even this last surviving habitat of offline romance cannot escape the algorithm. Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook in his college dorm because nothing else could have made him relevant among the hormonally charged young adults prowling for romance—or, at the very least, a fling. Now, Stanford University has another groundbreaking app called Date Drop. Among the 7,500 undergraduates in the college, 5,000 have used it. Date Drop has also spread to ten other colleges, including Princeton, MIT, and Columbia. The Chinese are also getting into it—hyperlocal campus dating apps are apparently curing people of swipe fatigue. And you know what? The Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur also tried to achieve the same bliss with their matchmaking app, Puppy Love. After all, it’s a “cryptographically secure couple matching platform with strong guarantees.”
Built in 2017, the platform has only been used during Valentine’s week. Students can shortlist four crushes from campus and wait for destiny, encryption, and mutual desperation to do the rest on 14 February. In its launch year, the app had more than 18,000 registered users. However, a 2020 alumna claims there weren’t many success stories. “It just helped some dateless people during the Valentine’s week,” she said. Which, to be fair, is still ambitious for something called Puppy Love. So much for “strong guarantees”. The Kanpur campus, apparently, didn’t really need the app. With roughly four girls for every 15 boys, people were either already spoken for or had spiritually given up.
Campuses are already designed for romantic discoveries. You are trapped with the same people for three to four years, away from parental control. An older cousin told me in Class 12th that I must enrol in a college far, far away from home if I want to find a boyfriend. “And then you can peacefully marry whoever your parents choose later because at least you’ve had fun,” she said, speaking with the confidence of a woman who had broken up with her college boyfriend to marry a same-caste boy from Shaadi.com.
This is exactly why Indian parents push their daughters toward all-girls colleges, which is laughable in itself, because it only makes them more feral. This columnist measured the distance between Indraprastha College for Women (IPCW) and Hansraj College twice a day, between lectures, for three years, all for a boy who wandered around chewing the collar of his T-shirt. It was on these pilgrimages that we discovered the colourful ecosystem of the Delhi Ridge. The trees are of DU romance, polluted with declarations of eternal love that only survived a semester. Rohit loves Sumit on one tree, then takes Sunaina behind another. Women of the IPCW hostel also had their Socials—official, prom-night-style events hosted at the Hindu College boys’ hostel. And paid by the boys. The moment the warden began taking names, even the most self-respecting women—those who loudly claimed they did not miss the drama of men—would run to register themselves. “I am just going for the food,” said way too many liars.
Meanwhile, at Jesus and Mary College, students famously have an area nicknamed “Lesbian Park”. Something about it makes just my heart grow bigger.
They—those who couldn’t make their college relationships last after graduating—say that campus romance doesn’t last. Personalities are underdeveloped, frontal lobes undercooked, and emotions misguided. A 21-year-old had to break up with her boyfriend because he turned out to be a satan worshipper. Another got pregnant and was dumped by her boyfriend, who said, “You’re manglik” (born under the influence of Mars). Silly girl was ready to marry a tree or a dog, whatever it took to win him back. Then some wise ones use Bumble to survive the penniless student life—a University of Hyderabad student landed herself a sugar daddy. He would recharge her phone without even asking and feed her sushi when she could not afford even the canteen samosa.
You can’t tell by the glow of my skin, but I was a fresher ten years ago, mad in love with the cloth chewer. He kept me away from Tinder by yapping endlessly about things no psychologically stable person cared about—astral projection, for example. In 2026, we both agree on two fundamental truths: I was insane for thinking he was worth my time, and he was a nut for believing his soul could detach from his body and float around the Delhi Ridge. We finally understand each other.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)