Before reading any further, you should know that yes, I am one of those girls. The ones that listen to Taylor Swift and secretly wish that people would stop hating on Bella and Edward for being a cute couple. I arrived in Cambridge still glowing with the aftermath of the Royal Wedding, full of big dreams of meeting my own Prince Charming and riding off into the sunset on a tandem bicycle. If Will and Kate met at university, that must be the way to do it – right? To my naïve first year self, the combination of romantic college architecture, midnight punting dates and the implicit assumption that, as Cambridge students, we are a cut above everyone else and basically destined to become the world’s next ruling power couple seemed an unstoppable recipe for fairytale romance and dreams come true.

However, after two years of failed dating attempts in the land of misfit geeks that is Cambridge, I have had to face the fact that the Cambridge dating scene is less like an enchanted fairytale than I’d thought, despite the common theme of kissing a lot of frogs. In a university of nearly twenty thousand students, there is a reason that not one of us was a cool kid at school – we are a finely balanced blend of emotional scarring and social awkwardness, and not even the ironic double-bluff of wearing t-shirts emblazoned ‘NERD’ and ‘LOSER’ can trick people into thinking otherwise: we are simply not ideal dating material. 

Before I’d even arrived in Cambridge, I’d heard the tales of soul mates whose eyes had first met across a not-so-crowded lecture hall, though I will admit that I came across considerably fewer stories about people finding the love of their life on a drinking society swap. My A level Latin teacher, for example, met her now-husband thirty years ago in a lecture on Juvenal: almost nobody had decided that this lecture was worth attending, but he’d followed her there (from Homerton – that shows commitment) in the hope of finally speaking to her, and had pretended to love Juvenal to make her like him. Romantic love story, or yet another dysfunctional Cambridge relationship? She has essentially married a stalker who plied her with some of the geekiest classical chat-up lines I have ever heard. And yet the fact that he’d even used said chat-up lines apparently made him a better catch than most of the guys out there.

Even if, by some freak of coincidence, you are lucky enough to find someone that isn’t too desperate a shade of Virgin, Lad or Too-Camp-To-Be-Comfortable, is it worth sacrificing sleep and a social life just for the little ‘in a relationship’ entry on your Facebook timeline? There’s a reason that those punting dates are always at midnight – midnight on the Cam is far too cold to be genuinely romantic, and definitely too cold for the charming Hugh Grant-esque tumble into the river that would definitively prove your date was The One. They’re at midnight because that’s when the college library closes and you can feel just about justified in taking a quick break from work. Just so long as you don’t have any friends that you’d promised to spend time with sometime this term, because that simply isn’t going to be possible. (Let’s hope that when you send out the wedding invitations there are enough people who at least remember how fun your single self was; it isn’t going to be a particularly well-attended affair otherwise.)

So, at the risk of already sounding like a bitter spinster at the age of 19, I’ve come to the conclusion that dating just isn’t worth it. In Cambridge, at least. Perhaps The One is here – maybe I’ve even met him already – but right now he’s just an awkward academic, and I’m not much better. I’ll give him a few years to grow up into a real boy before I make my move, and hopefully by then we’ll both actually be capable of a functioning adult relationship. And in the meantime, I’m going to enjoy being a Cambridge singleton: I can misbehave at bops without fear of the consequences, eat as much ice cream as I like, spend whole weeks in pyjama-wearing essay crisis mode, and most importantly, I can dance with total abandon in Cindies without caring what that carefully-choreographed Rafiki impression during ‘A Circle of Life’ will do to my love life. What more could a girl want?