'The End of Courtship' at Harvard?

In 2013, you will probably have a lot of questions about love. These should be five of them:

1. If Ivy Leaguers are refuting The End of Courtship, are they endorsing The End of Empircal Reasoning?

2. Which came first: The End of Courtship, or The End of Men?

3. Was The End of Men before The End of Sex?

4. Would you rather The End of Sex With Men before Courtship, or The End of Courtship with Men before Sex?

5. Is it a coincidence that, as we are battered with The Ends of Everything Sexy, we can turn manically and trustingly to The Beginning of Second Season of "Girls"?

Well, the last one's a no, according to The New York Times in a recent article entitled "The End of Courtship." The article—which is hilarious, by the way—asserts that "hanging out" is the new dating, and that female urban straight 20-somethings who work in media or PR (it doesn't really talk about anyone else) are dissatisfied with their male non-suitors. "For evidence, look no further than 'Girls,' HBO's cultural weathervane for urban 20-somethings," writes Alex Williams, "where none of the main characters paired off in a manner that might count as courtship even a decade ago."

Luckily for y'all, newly released statistics say that the answer to the first question on the list is also negative. Even if you are watching 'Girls'—and you should be—you're probably still dating, which is, um, kind of weird, because we at Flyby know more students who are engaged or married than properly dating.

According to the ever-amusing college dating site DateMySchool, however, even in 2013, 54% of Ivy Leaguers say their ideal first date is still a dinner date. (Also according to DateMySchool, if the straight men going on these possibly imaginary dinner dates take physical attractiveness as a primary criterion in their selection of a date-mate, a majority of them would like those first date dinner dates to be with girls from BC.) And 74% of those Ivy League guys would want to cover the bill, even though 68% of Ivy broads are down to split it.

If these ideals and conditionals are confusing you, don't worry, they're confusing us too. But we checked, and according to the 2012 Senior Survey, 63.8% of graduating Harvard seniors had dated one or more persons.

So we just have to ask: WHERE ARE YOU PEOPLE? Maybe you're all just in secret relationships that are non-relationships, and since, according to DateMySchool, 96% of you would still prefer to end a relationship in person, rather than through text or setting a Facebook relationship status to "single," the world—and the person you were in a non-relationship that was actually a relationship with—will never know.

There's also a chance that the survey's "Ivy Leaguers" don't translate to "Harvard students" at all. Perhaps the statistics indicate that it's one of our seven siblings who's going steady.

Our bets are on Yale. Sure, two years ago dating for Elis may have been a "Sisyphean feat," but now that they have the good fortune to say no to bad sex, maybe they're also saying yes to dinner. After all, if H-Y memories prove faithful, New Haven has at least two good sit-down pizza places and may have also invented the hamburger, right?