By Issachar Bacang
It’s called a fling for a reason. A quick swish of a movement and it’s all over. Flings, as a concept, are something that I’ve tried in my younger years and hope to God I’ll never be stupid enough to try again.
But in a sense, I sympathize with these kids. You’re a freshman in college. What life is in these hallowed halls has been mythologized by popular movies and TV shows. All the great memories, experiences, stories, romances, and heartbreaks that you’ll reminisce on and tell your kids about when you’re 50 will all likely take place within the timespan of these four, cracked-out years. And so it almost seems as if it’s a rite of passage to engage in one of these flings. For most of us, the decision to go to college and to choose a course to devote four years of our life to is already a huge gamble, so going on some blind date at Hibalag with someone you barely know seems like a drop in the bucket in comparison.
I knew of these flings long before, but I never truly knew the depth of the depravity of the situation until I broke a promise I made to myself as a freshman: I downloaded Reddit. I’m a columnist now, so I need a constant stream of info and gossip for when my informants are asleep or studying for a test. I use Reddit professionally: as a research tool. What I found there, I expected as much. But it was still jarring. It’s that leap across the pond, that crossing of the Rubicon when theory ends and the proof is looking at you like a baby in church.
Seventeen year olds. Because apparently, they have yet to develop a backbone to actually talk to anyone in real life. Seventeen year olds try to sell themselves on Reddit to potential flings like they’re pitching their fourth-year thesis proposal. They describe themselves in vague terms like ‘chinito’, ‘moreno’, ‘tall’, ‘rich’, ‘nonchalant’, ‘bad boy’, [insert nationality other than Filipino]; it’s the funniest but also the saddest thing I’ve ever read. I play Pascual’s wager with threads like these: it’s either they’re (1) lying about being all this, because if it were true they wouldn’t be on Reddit looking for a fling or (2) they would have to be the most socially awkward human beings to be all that, and still not be able to ask someone out.
But I get it. You don’t jump straight into it. You dip a toe in and test the waters. Hibalag flings make sense as the one thing you do in your freshman or sophomore years and grow out of eventually. It’s good for your constitution. It’s that first breath of fresh air for when you’re finally born into your college life. The problem is when people treat it like it’s a yearly Holiday. New year, new fling sort of deal. Some people don’t want to call these guys out, so I have to do it. Live your life how you want to, but you have to admit or at least make peace with the fact that someone in their fourth or fifth year out on the prowl for their next Hibalag fling is not a good look—on anybody.
It reeks of desperation, it makes you look creepy, and it’s a blaring siren to everyone around you that you have either commitment issues or are just now looking for love and thought that a Hibalag fling was the best way to find it. It’s unbecoming. And there’s also the issue that a lot of those looking for Hibalag flings just graduated from senior high so, make of that what you will.
It’s a formative experience, it’s a tradition, it’s a rite of passage for many Sillimanians. For many others, it’s an annoying expectation, it’s a waste of time, and it’s slowly becoming socially taboo to seriously participate in it if you aren’t in your first year or something. The dogmatic moralist in me wants to condemn this, but honestly it’s like condemning a gust of wind for ruining your hairstyle: these flings are a fact of life—an annoying fact of life—that you’re just going to have to deal with.
From the grapevine exploding in whispers of this year’s new Hibalag creep-to-lookout-for, to stories of dates gone wrong and exposés about how so and so did something I didn’t like. The fall-out of this yearly crop of flings is a nightmare, and it clogs up my info and gossip networks with all this late adolescent jibber-jabber. I don’t know about you though, but I have to hear about it constantly every year. Even as a masteral student, I haven’t escaped the fallout.
So before you tell me all about it, let me cut to the chase and ask you instead: how’d that Hibalag fling work out?
