Love at B-School: The Eight Laws of MBA Dating

Katz students unwinding

Who says business isn’t romantic? Profit squeezes, position limits, extension swaps, rollovers, interlocking directorates—horizontal mergers, for heaven’s sake. This stuff is downright steamy. Factor in a tight-knit cadre of ambitious, successful people in the prime of life, a pressure-cooker environment, and enough recruiter-sponsored cocktails to irrigate the Gobi Desert, and nature is bound to take its course, so you can click here for more teasing videos. We can’t guarantee you’ll find true love, but based on extensive conversations with MBAs who’ve been there and, er, done that, we can make a few confident predictions about the dating scene you’ll face as a B-school student. Without further ado: the Immutable Laws of MBA Dating. Learn them. Live them. Love them.

1) If you weren’t single when you arrived, odds are you will be by Thanksgiving.

Unless you’re pretty permanently attached (by, say, a ring) to your pre-B-school honey, there’s a good chance you’ll break up a few months into your first term. “We called Thanksgiving of first year Black Thursday,” says Tracy Lawrence, 29, who graduated from Harvard Business School in 1999. Thanksgiving break presents a handy opportunity to bring messy entanglements to an end face-to-face, but whether the demise takes a week or a year, preexisting relationships are destined to bite the dust. The weight of B-school—its time demands, the insularity of the community, the team bonding—can break through longstanding romantic ties like a wrecking ball.

Christine, 30, a second-year at Wake Forest’s Babcock School, managed to hold out until February of her first year before she broke things off with her boyfriend of almost three years—but an end at some point seemed inevitable. “Whenever I’d visit him, I’d have to concentrate really hard to forget about deadlines and assignments,” she says. “I’d repeat over and over again in my head, ‘Try to have fun.’ “ Julie Karickhoff, 26, a Georgetown second-year, also bid adieu to a beau five months into her first year. “He thought I studied too hard, that I was being a nerd and overdoing it,” she says. “He didn’t understand where I was coming from, but at first you don’t know if you can compete in business school. I just wanted to make sure I could make it and have good grades.” Michael Preis, 27, who graduated from Columbia Business School last spring, also succumbed to the inexorable pull early in his first year. “I had a miserable time trying to break away from classes and group work to be with my girlfriend,” he says. “You’re making such a huge investment in the network of people at business school. To be torn away from that defeats the purpose of being there.”

2) For two years, you will work hard but have a very good time.

MBA candidates quickly discover that business school is tailor-made for dating. “I had one stretch of six weeks where I was seeing three people at once,” says Preis. “I was trying to keep track of who was from where, which town, which college, who had the dog, the cat, the parrot. But you can’t keep that kind of pace up.” Probably not—but chances are you will have some juggling to do. “You’re in a social environment, surrounded by people who are smart, motivated, the right age, at the right time in their lives, and with the free time to date,” says Harvard grad Lawrence. And you will have a lot in common with them: similar work experience, similar aspirations.

What’s more, MBA candidates come to school prepared, in a sense, to work the room. They know that they have only two years to nurture the precious connections that can make a business degree so valuable. And B-schools take advantage of and reinforce their students’ networking instincts. At most schools, there’s a constant barrage of mixers, cocktail parties, and other assorted meet-and-greets. Each class or section is likely to have a student appointed to organize parties and recruiting events. “I worked harder and played harder than I ever did when I was in the working world,” says Paul Campbell, 35, who graduated from the Thunderbird School last spring after attending his fair share of parties. Liz Williams, HBS ‘99, met her husband, Ather, when he was the social chair of her section. “He would always try to convince me to go to pub night,” Williams says. Finally he succeeded—and the couple were married by graduation. Most events are designed to ultimately get you a job and a Rolodex full of precious contacts, but they just might land you a date, if not a spouse, as well.

3) Women are scarce and therefore in demand. Men are a plentiful commodity.

The B-school dating scene (heterosexual, anyway) is a good case study on that old rule of supply and demand: What happens when a commodity is scarce and its consumers are plentiful? Men outnumber women by as much as two to one in many MBA programs, which means women can be picky. “The numbers game is horrible for us,” says Mike Aaronson, 25, a Wharton second-year who writes a column that occasionally addresses dating issues for the campus newspaper. “A lot of guys go outside the B-school community for dates. Having other grad schools around helps—nursing students are popular, for example.” For women, the attention can be flattering, but that doesn’t mean they find B-school to be a feast of eligible men. Kim Jabal, 32, HBS ‘00, did meet her husband at Harvard. But she notes, “I got lucky and met him the first week.” Some of her friends weren’t as blown away by the pickings. “They thought, ‘This is going to be fun. Think of all those cute guys—they’re so smart,’ “ says Jabal. “They were kind of underwhelmed.” Her explanation: “The average 27-year-old woman is ready for marriage. The average 27-year-old man is not. Their expectation is not to go to business school to meet their wives.”

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