Loves in the Stairs

“I feel like Stuy[vesant] has a lower than average macking-to-people ratio, so people get so surprised when they see it. Stuy is a pretty decent-sized school. It’s got over 3000 kids, so you’d think there’d be more macking, but you don’t see that much of it. People live far away from each other. In a more local school, couples are able to spend a lot more time together.” —Rong Zheng Wu, junior

“I heard people have sex in the Hudson.” —anonymous, junior

“Waste of time.” —Yuchen Pan, junior

“A lot of kids who would normally take their freshman and sophomore years to gain confidence and self-esteem didn’t have that opportunity due to COVID. From what I’ve seen this year, it’s just been a bunch of immature and insecure kids running around and having crushes, given a few exceptions. Even for the kids mature enough to maintain a relationship, a lot of them don’t want to, in favor of having a more free spirited life.” —Akram Khalifa, junior

“I don’t have any experience, but there are couples. […] I feel like a lot of our parents are strict and first-generation [immigrants].” —Samira Esha, senior

“Dating culture at Stuyvesant, to whatever extent it exists, is pretty concentrated within friend groups. Obviously, there are clusters of people that gravitate toward each other, and maybe within each of those, there’ll be two or three couples, but there’s not a lot of intermixing beyond that. There [are] hook-ups that happen here and there, but if you’re talking about prolonged relationships, [they are] almost always people in the same friend group, and tend to be people of the same race, same socioeconomic background, same culture, etc. […] People are just lame.” —Theo Kubovy-Weiss, senior

“Every long relationship is in the same social circle. I know a lot of people who will date the best friend of their ex—so like, people who are close friends will have had the same ex. Let’s just say the web at Stuy is very interconnected. […] People are pretty conscious of how they’re perceived by others, and most people are too scared to make the first move.” —Angie Grzybowski, senior

“There’s also a stigma about academics while dating—like, ‘Oh, if I dated someone, I won’t be able to do well in class.’” —Andreas Khoury, senior

“[Couples] are mainly students who already knew each other, or knew each other through mutual friends.” — Malka Lubelski, freshman

“We came out of [quarantine]. Everyone was touch-starved and super lonely […] and now, [everyone is] being overly physical in the hallways because they have no concept of what and where intimacy should be, and the time and place for things. As soon as the mandate was gone and masks were off, it was over. There are people kissing in the hallways and cuddling on the escalator. It’s nasty. It’s gross.” —Asa Muhammad, senior

“The dating culture is just really weird. Actually, it’s pretty normal, but because Stuy is weird, the dating culture also happens to be weird.” —Jasmine Wang, senior

“Some people here are really lonely and resort to a lot of different underhanded means to get a significant other—stuff like posting thirst traps.” —Jasmine Yuen, junior

“I guess what really sucks about Stuy is that no one is willing to acknowledge their feelings. They’d rather just let it sit out of fear of rejection. I don’t think people at Stuy like commitment, but that’s just based on what I’ve seen.” —Ashley Lin, junior

“I have a lot of friends who talk about people confessing to them, them saying ‘no thank you,’ and it being really weird. Everyone here is weird.” —Kai Li Moore, junior

“There’s a senior and a freshman dating. So there’s that. There are a surprising number of couples. It’s just normal teenage couples, besides that one senior-freshman couple.” —Shrina sophomore

“When someone starts dating another person, you have both of their friend groups always talking about it. There’s just a lot of talking about it. It’s seen as taboo because it’s so uncommon at Stuy.” —Ian Loh, senior

“There are some boundaries that should not be crossed. Seniors, don’t date freshmen.” —Ariel Fuchs, junior

“The dating culture here is nonexistent. Dating within Stuy is weird. Especially as a junior, all the cliques intermingle, so breaking up with someone creates so many problems you have to go through. The whole grade talks about it, and there [are] going to be people hating you afterwards.” —Abtahe Mazumder, junior

“What I see mostly are just close friends who [have been friends] for long periods of time that just become something more. They have to be friends for a while and then be like ‘Oh yeah, we’re dating now.’ Near Valentine’s Day you’ll just see a score of random people suddenly liking each other, but then October to December is a big breakup time.” —Anonymous, sophomore

“The people who do date, date around a lot. People date more outside of Stuy than in Stuy, and they date in their grade more than out.” —Jonathan Fang, sophomore