I used to think it was like this everywhere. After a disastrous freshman year “relationship,” the world appeared to be a veritable wasteland of ineligible bachelors.

Dating just isn’t how it used to be, I figured.

After all, with a steady increase of sex in the media, people were focusing less on getting romantic and more on getting physical. I explained the Villanova relationship situation to some friends from home, who seemed both shocked and amused to hear it.

We assessed and analyzed, and then we agreed. Villanova is not a “dating” school. We’re a group of students who will meet our future significant others in a bar in New York City or on a beach in California. But certainly not at an open bar in Philly or at lunch in the Pit.

I understood that this was my fate, and eventually I accepted it – until I met an alumnus who revealed some startling news. She had been telling a story to my friends about how she had found her husband in a bar nearly 10 years after she first met him.

“That’s so funny,” I said. “Where did you know him from?”

“We went to Villanova together,” she said.

We all laughed, admitting that we could never imagine dating anyone at Villanova, let alone marrying them. And then she dropped the bomb.

“You know, I read somewhere that something like 66 percent of Villanovans wind up marrying each other or something like that. Seriously.”

Seriously?

That would mean that of all the guys we find appallingly stuffy, of all those girls that seem ridiculously uptight, one of them might be sharing a bed and a life with us someday?

Needless to say, we weren’t laughing anymore.

Here at Villanova, I’ve heard the phrase “but I really don’t want a relationship” almost as much as I’ve heard “sweet life.” Normally, when that white lie is uttered, it means someone is not ready to make an emotional commitment, but more than willing to make a sexual one.

However, the dictionary defines the word relationship as “a particular type of connection existing between people having dealings with each other,” so that justification is null and void.

Still, we’ve all made the excuse, and you can bet we’ve all been lying.

We have become professionals at copping out. We cop out of class on warm, sunny days, we cop out of spending money by stealing toilet paper, and we cop out of letting our guards down the moment our feelings become factors.

Why are Villanovans so against the L-word?

Perhaps it’s because our University is so stacked with high school homecoming kings and prom queens and other high school royalty. Maybe the beautiful people all over campus have made our standards too high. If we settle for one bombshell, we might miss out on another, so we simply settle for singleness.

Or, we’re simply too in love with ourselves to share that emotion with someone else.

The happily married alumnus had also confessed that her husband may have been the last person she would have considered dating when they were undergrads.

So what is it about this campus that makes interacting with each other so awkward and difficult? Somewhere between kegs at the courts and parties in the Quad, we’ve become too self-righteous and stubborn to let on that we might actually want to be vulnerable to someone else.

We’re Villanovans. We’re used to getting what we want: the grades, the clothes and the comfortable lifestyles. As a result, we’ve become afraid of something far, far worse than any relationship – rejection.

We think the world might explode if we don’t get the guy or girl of our dreams, so most of the time we just don’t try at all.

Thankfully, our paralyzing fears seem to dissipate after graduation, allowing us to see past the blacked out messes who threw up on our shoes. We will see marriage material in our peers, perhaps even those we vowed never to speak to or date, even if our lives depended on it.

But what changes?

We probably realize that there are more important things to be terrified of than saving face in front of our crushes: living alone, getting a job and growing up. Most likely, we finally manage to get over ourselves.

So look around, at the guy who constantly nods off in class or the obnoxious girl who yells instead of talks. Who knows? In five years, you might be saying “I do.”