By Owen Henry

At some point this past week, in between multi-night research binges and the subsequent hours I spent completely devoid of thought, I noticed someone had invited me to join IvyDate (just as they did many of you). I didn’t care so much about the last part, as for a few joyous seconds of my day I was able to revel in the knowledge that someone wanted me to be somewhere. It is moments of fleeting happiness like this that I must now live for, as I even now feel the yapping, ceaselessly humping daschund that is Senior Honors attempting to fuck the joy out of my waking hours. It could have been an invitation to a garage sale.

But at least I was happy.

Upon further inspection and inquiry, I realized that IvyDate was not a garage sale but in fact a dating site geared towards the elite and intellectually oppressive graduates of our nation’s Ivy League. Or at least this was their claim; seeing as how I had made it on to their invite list as a not-yet-graduate of Oberlin, I was skeptical of the selectivity of their dating pool. You let the Obies in, and it’s really all downhill towards the community colleges from there. Upon further contemplation of this concept, I realized how ill-concieved such a place would be if it were a reality: a singles site full of nothing but the most driven, intellectually ruthless people on the planet? I’ve had cheerier nightmares. There would be drama and ads for cheap “prescription” Adderall everywhere.

But then I thought that, as a young, lately single bachelor of (questionable) intellectual credentials, perhaps it was wrong to discount it entirely. My marital status is fortunate in this case, because in the opening email they posed me a very simple request:

“If you are no longer single, we kindly ask you to disregard this invitation, and wish you the very best in your relationship.”

What a relief! Their attempt to care about filtering out all those pesky couples from their singles site impressed me sufficiently to cause a temporary lapse of reason. I signed up.

A quick Googling revealed that at some point in the near future, these people might ask me to pay them. “Fuck that,” I said, until I read that apparently they make the service available to students at a greatly discounted rate. Makes sense, I think, considering how they wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere near this site if I’d seen some kind of billing screen. And then I see on their page that they’ve been in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The New York Times site confirms it – I find the site mentioned in a post script about a Harvard exclusive dating site that is apparently “a highbrow take on the likes of SugarDaddie.com,” which the founders of IvyDate are also apparently responsible for. I am again disheartened. I am already too broke to pay for the site – am I also going to be expected to pay for the girls (and Ivy league girls at that, which means restaurants with foreign words that actually make sense)?

I was almost too discouraged to complete my profile. As it stands, I’ve stopped at 50%, because it was at that point that I logged out of the site accidentally and had to log back in. When I did so, I had realized how’d they gotten my name:

A big flashing ad with 5 blank text boxes appeared, saying “$20 for each friend who subscribes!” In the background, I also noticed an advertisement promising a chance to win a case of Andy Warhol special reserve wine.

I had not really been invited anywhere. One of you assholes sold me out for $20 and possibly some pop art vino. If my embitterment towards the world were not already absolute, your greedy abusal of my academic email address would have done so. I hope you enjoy your 30 pieces of Campbell’s soup can silver, you IvyJudas.

And if you got an invite, that means they sold you out too. I think we all deserve at least $10.

Maybe then I could afford to pay for IvyDate.