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On Thursday, Nov. 1, an alumni talk by BC’s famous hook-up guru Kerry Cronin made for an experience that was anything but ordinary.
Courtesy of Kara Weeks
I walked into the Cadigan Alumni Center on Brighton Campus expecting the usual lecture scene on campus, but to my surprise I was greeted with bacon-wrapped scallops, cheese platters and drinks. Apparently, if you want to eat well you should crash an alumni event on campus. I didn't come for the fancy hors d’oeuvres, though; I was there to hear the fabulous Kerry Cronin give one of her infamous relationship talks.
I expected to see only women in the crowd for an event entitled "Agape Latte Grande: Was It Really a Bachelor's Degree? Why You Never Really Learned to Date in College and What to Do about It Now." Surprisingly, about half of the audience members were males and I suspected they were there for the same reasons as the girls. As Kelly Monzella, A&S ’15 put it, “I’m here to find out what I’m doing wrong.”
Courtesy of Kara Weeks
Although it was meant for students who have graduated, Cronin’s talk was informative for undergraduate students too, offering a bit of insight on how to successfully seek a relationship, especially once this chapter of our lives is over. Luckily for you, I can divulge on some of the dating secrets Cronin hilariously revealed to us.
Cronin started with an idea that after we graduate and move into “the real world,” we leave college with a lot of emotional stuff (she tripped up with the other “s” word the first time she tried to explain this) and we choose to either unpack some of it, put some of it away in the hall closet to forget about, or get rid of it. Not surprisingly, she told us that our relationship success has a lot to do with this “stuff” that we carry around with us.
According to Cronin, there are two small things that we need for a good relationship: self-knowledge and self-love. Unfortunately, gaining self-knowledge and self-love is easier said than done.
Courtesy of Kara Weeks
She then referenced Aristotle’s ideas about finding “the mean” and applied this to dating. We all know the people who are in the excess of dating, constantly seeking a relationship; the people who are in the deficiency of dating, the “getting busy without getting serious” people; or the people who just opt out in general. Finding the mean in dating has a lot to do with your self-knowledge, knowing exactly what kind of person and relationship makes you happy.
She named five things that we can do to establish better self-knowledge: consider our fears and desires, what our past tells us about our present, what friend can be most honest with us, what kind of moats we build and who gets to go past them and finally, how we get in our own way.
Once we know this information about self-knowledge, we can try and love everything about ourselves. Cronin explained that once you have self-love you can actually find someone who isn’t just making up for the faults that we find in ourselves. I think this advice was even better than bacon-wrapped scallops.
