Casual Dating
Our second casual date was a mess. Pumpkin innards and seeds were strewn across the tabletops of the Hanszen College sundeck as our dates and friends carved out designs ranging from an elephant to a Rice University owl. Christmas music hummed from a laptop as seven couples got down and dirty carving up their pumpkins. Against a backdrop of powderpuff teams playing on the intramural fields, pumpkin carving with a group of friends on campus bore little semblance to a date night. Indeed, one of us had not even mustered the courage to ask out a date and opted instead to invite a friend. Throughout the course of the evening, it became very apparent that only one of us was on a real date and that the distinction between a real date and a friend date makes all the difference in successful casual dating.