It’s noon and the Main Green is swarming with students in a distinctly middle-of-September, beginning-of-the-semester way. Frisbees fly, people careen from Wilson’s steps and a couple reads together on the grass. And they aren’t the only ones — some guy and his girlfriend clasp fingers outside of Sayles, an older man in a suit hugs a woman in a way that suggests she is his wife, a girl kisses her girlfriend beside one of the lampposts.

We say it’s hard to find love at Brown—or any college campus—these days, grouse about the lack of suitable boys or girls or both over Ratty dinners, bemoan our prospects and wonder aloud where we’ll ever find a relationship. According to a Herald Poll conducted last fall between Nov. 5-7, 43.3 percent of Brown students had had no sexual partners since the beginning of the semester. Sure, sex isn’t the only yardstick, but maybe there’s something to be said about a campus where almost half of all students aren’t experiencing love’s most intimate gesture. College is a pressure cooker—one where love might be locked out. Maybe love is invisible. But if the Main Green is any indication, maybe we’re just looking in the wrong place.

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Sitting around a table last Saturday with six other girls after the annual “Sex at Brown” event, a lecture about the seven stages of sexual desire doled out by Alexis Saccoman ’04, drinking wine and sampling tentative forkfuls of pumpkin pie, our talk inevitably turns to sex and dating. One-night-stands, what does everyone think?

“Only with someone you’re not attached to,” says one. “Only if you’re drunk.”

Another suggests Brown students can only find someone at an intoxicated frat party, where they’re sure to be uninhibited, that there are no meaningful relationships at this institution supposedly ingrained with social liberation and sexual freedom. That love does not, in fact, exist at all. “People are too busy. There’s no time.”

In the early 1990s, an article called “The Lessons of Love” appeared in Psychology Today—a venerable piece on the inherent difficulty in studying one of our most complex emotions. “No one volume or theory or research program can capture love and transform it into a controlled bit of knowledge,” wrote Clyde Hendrick, a psychology professor from Texas Tech University, one of the article’s authors. And at Brown, where people sit in Blue State and discuss Sartre and Freud, it seems a place that cultivates knowledge cannot also capture love. People may come to Brown for the New Curriculum, because there are no requirements, but no one ever says they came to Brown for love. Are people too preoccupied with their classes, with toting around giant Orgo books, with sitting for hours in the SciLi’s “Zero Decibel” area, to kindle a more emotional fire?

Freud said, “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness,” but when offered the choice, those Brown students holed up at the Rock on a Friday night seem to neglect love in a blind quest for that elusive “plus” next to their “S.”

There seems to be a chasm, a passionate rift, between those on the Main Green who have found love at Brown and those who haven’t and don’t believe they ever will. But just because Brown students are, notoriously, busy simultaneously saving the world and acing all their classes doesn’t mean love doesn’t exist on campus.

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“I think that it’s not that hard, I just think that people are now reaching an age where they’re more interested in finding love,” says sophomore Mila Owen. “People come here with romanticized notions that they expect to find love at college, and when they don’t, it’s easy for people to say how hard it is to find love at Brown.”

And even those who have managed to find someone can’t seem to make it last.

“I have a lot of friends who’ve been in relationships at Brown,” says sophomore Helene Vincent, “but they haven’t lasted more than a couple of months.”

And yet, there are those who have. Especially, it seems, those who weren’t looking in the first place. And we’ve all heard of Perkins sweethearts—first-years who somehow turn dreaded isolation into coveted marriage.

At a Southern California “Brown Send-Off” event in August, a couple who graduated in the late 1990s stood before more than 50 incoming first years and their nervous parents, recounting the first lecture—one of those overwhelming ones in the OMAC during orientation—where the speaker told the thousand or so freshmen who had ventured from their new dorm rooms to look around. No one believed the speaker when she said she thought almost half the people in that gym would find the person they would spend the rest of their lives with, but there they were now, at a sprawling house in the Pacific Palisades, telling all of us they had met in Perkins that same night when they had shaken their heads in disbelief at the presumptuous speaker.

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They say the story of how they met is long, but we have the whole afternoon. Which, apparently, we might need because Brielle Friedman and Jason Gorelick, both sophomores, are intent on kissing after every sentence.

Suffice it to say they’ve been together for 10 months, an eternity for today’s capricious college crowd. At least for them, finding love at Brown wasn’t hard. “It isn’t difficult if that’s what you’re looking for,” Friedman says.

But Gorelick disagrees, though it’s almost hard to tell since they keep sneaking light pecks that migrate from cheek to lips and back countless times during the ensuing conversation. It’s not that people aren’t looking, Gorelick tells me, it’s just that people are “constantly changing.”

And for Friedman and Gorelick, love snuck up on them—which might be the way it has to happen at a place that tends to intellectualize everything, that values philosophy over football championships and FemSex over frat parties.

“I specifically didn’t want a relationship,” says Gorelick. “But I didn’t expect to find someone so amazing.”

And though they say it hasn’t been easy to maintain their relationship since they don’t have much time to see each other—“our interests academically are at the opposite end of the spectrum,” Gorelick says—there’s something about the way they sit together on the Barbour loveseat that indicates that whatever they’re doing is working.

“We put a lot more effort into communication,” Friedman offers as an explanation. The ease with which they talk is palpable as Gorelick adds, without missing a beat, “Especially when things are hard here.”

The easy banter continues as Friedman and Gorelick lean into each other and Friedman grasps Gorelick’s hand.

“We’re so open with each other,” Gorelick says. “Our relationship is very transparent.”

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Is that the secret to love at Brown? Would not actively looking for love—coupled with openness when it’s found—solve the love conundrum?

Until we find the answer, until we leave our intellectually and emotionally isolated perch atop College Hill, maybe true love won’t exist for too many at Brown. But it definitely exists for some, especially for those people I have had the misfortune of loving, people who had already found someone before me.