Is It Love? Or Just Caltech?

Giacomo di Chirico, He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not (1872). A fitting representation of having a crush on someone here, except the petals are fleeting interactions.

Disclaimer: This is satire. Mostly.

Let’s talk about the familiar experience of falling for someone on a campus so small that it may, in fact, be a social experiment. The experimental design: one insulated campus the size of a city block, two gossip cycles and maybe three eligible romantic candidates. Each has disqualifying traits, yet no one’s left to take their place.

You find yourself obsessing over someone, not because they’re especially attractive or even vaguely capable of emotional depth. They’re simply there. On a campus where the dating pool is more of a dating puddle, they’re somehow still available after frosh mating season.

You are not alone. Many have succumbed to the Caltech Mirage: an unfortunate phenomenon in which repeated exposure to the same few faces begins to warp the soul. Suddenly, you’re impressed with the fact that they held the door open for you at Red Door.

On this 124-acre campus, standards crash without mercy, much like REGIS during course registration. Someone with a pulse? Incredible. Someone who can communicate? Revolutionary. Someone with more than an ounce of emotional intelligence? A unicorn.

You are not in love. You are in a proximity-induced hallucination. In environments this insular, the same faces orbit your daily routine like moons until familiarity breeds connection, not contempt. At least not right away. It’s exposure therapy disguised as a slow burn. This is not Cupid’s arrow. This is boredom.

But let us be generous to your oxytocin-deprived brain. Perhaps you do enjoy their company. Perhaps you do light up at the sound of their terrible jokes (which might be a sign of prolonged exposure). You don’t have to dismiss it as desperation. There’s something poetic about finding closeness in proximity. Yes, your options are limited, but that doesn’t automatically negate your feelings. Just because you’re in a tiny pond doesn’t mean the fish aren’t decent.

It just means you have to be a little more honest about why you’re drawn to someone. Is it chemistry? Or just shared academic trauma? Did they captivate your heart? Or did they just have a normal conversation with you? Only you can say.

Romance isn’t dead. It’s just heavily context-dependent and occasionally fueled by sleep deprivation plus a lack of better options.