As parents clear the bustling activity of ASU’s welcome week mayhem, some students are overwhelmed with their newly found freedom from their childhood rules. But with freedom comes responsibility, especially when it comes to our hearts.
Dorm life, college classes with hundreds of filled seats, a campus with more than 70,000 students daily: What does this add up to? An endless supply of possible significant others. Sort of.
The problem with starting school is the freshness of everyone on campus — these aren’t your same friends from high school or your typical buddies from your hometown. New people are fun and exciting, point blank.
As we swim through the sea of potential matches, it’s important to completely disregard a very large piece of advice you may have naïvely been given: Find someone nice.
“Well, he/she is nice!”
Nice? Laying in laundry after it comes out of the dryer is nice. Ice cream sundaes are nice. A professor canceling a homework assignment before you start it is nice.
Yawn. You deserve better than nice.
Now wait, so I should find a jerk? Not at all. Being a nice person is pretty much the standard in our day and age. But laughter, on the other hand, is a rare quality.
“Being kind should be a given, not a standalone quality,” Liana Weston of Teen Vogue said.
Whatever the driving force you have for developing feelings for another individual, it should not be just based on the niceness of their actions because half the reason they’re being nice is to impress you. But finding that someone who can genuinely make you laugh a milk-squirts-out-of-nose laughter is quality we hardly find.
It’s so easy to be “nice,” but it’s a lot harder to make someone authentically laugh on a daily basis in casual conversation. Why? There's a certain level of trust and comfort that comes with the openness of free-flowing conversations.
I’m not saying that everyone should suddenly pick up a jokester persona to impress a potential date, but there’s definitely a plus one for those who can be fun and casual around someone in whom they are interested. That’s way more attractive and charming than just being, well, “nice.”
“We prefer eclectic boys who are not only warmhearted, but also willing to let loose and make light of an awkward situation — the more dynamic, exciting, and unconventionally silly they are, the better,” Weston said.
Looking for someone who can casually hold a conversation while making you laugh can also weed out the serious from the not-so-interested in your personality type. Being taken out on expensive dates or going along with wild shenanigans may seem like a sure-fire way to win his or her heart, but many are fooled.
“If his conversation is generic, his efforts typically restricted to weekend nights and his hangout suggestions limited to drinking together, odds are he’s looking for something less than exclusive,” Madeline Harrington for Hercampus.com said.
While these articles' purposes are primarily about warning women about about men, the topic is a two-sided coin. Fellas, don’t settle for a woman who can’t make you smile because of something dumb she’s not afraid to say in front of you.
Both guys and girls deserve more than just niceness because life is just too short to go without laughter. Don't take these first few weeks of flings too seriously, because life is too short for that, too.
“Appreciate being young and free because eventually, when you do settle down, you’ll feel far more content and have less of a desire to look back,” University Primetime reminds us.
Reach the columnist at rsmouse@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @BeccaSmouse
Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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