Robbie Bernstein rocks boots and cuffed pants. Brooklin Pigg//AS Review
By Brooklin Pigg
Relationships can be as trendy as a pair of rolled up jeans or as practical as rolled up sleeves, but what they all have in common is that there is a beginning.
Cuffing season, the phenomenon in which single people find themselves suddenly tied down in a serious relationship during the cold weather only to break up when the heat approaches, is about to take full effect.
Junior Nolan Kirby, wearing a cuffed beanie and double-cuffed pants, has opted out of cuffing season early.
“This year was my first year,” Kirby said.
He got into a relationship at the beginning of fall quarter, and it recently ended. He isn’t looking to participate again, but still believes that cuffing season exists.
“Once school starts, things can get pretty hectic and you want someone there to listen to you and be there for you,” Kirby said.
A Vice article on cuffing looks into studies of dating apps and porn sites to verify “a correlation between winter months and increased usage,” describing this concept as more of a social reaction than a scientific one. They quote a statistic from Pornhub that show searches for “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” went up 92 percent in December compared to summer months.
“I think it’s a lot easier now to find a cuff, a gal or boy, whatever your preference is, it’s a lot easier now,” Kirby said.
Junior Lydia Johnson, sporting cuffed jeans, agrees with Kirby that this rise in relationship is more of a response to social environments than an evolutionary trait.
“You could say there’s a correlation between people coming back to school, and being around people who are into similar things,” Johnson said.
Standing nearby with no cuffed clothing, junior Joe Loughren scoffs.
“If you want to get warm in the winter, just get a heated blanket,” Loughren said.
Junior Robbie Bernstein, exposing his double-cuffed pants and sleeves, thinks this upcoming season has to do with hibernation, leaning more towards the evolutionary side.
“There’s someone to be warm with you for the hard seasons to come,” Bernstein said, “Maybe someone to help you gather.”
Sophomore Ira Ché Glassen thinks it’s an outcome of both evolutionary and social influences, although he had no idea what cuffing season was.
“I feel like, with everyone collecting in one place, it would happen socially,” Glassen said. “Then also, evolutionary, you would kind of suspect that sort of thing in the survival instinct because you’re collecting in tighter groups to get over the winter, over the hard times.”
He didn’t wear any cuffed clothing, pronouncing it more as a functional choice than a fashionable one. In the winter, he said there is a risk of cold wrists.
Senior Questen Inghram, a self-proclaimed cuffing season denier, asserted that his sleeves weren’t cuffed, but rather rolled. He said he had to look up what cuffing season was on askmen.com.
Even though most of his remarks were negative, he appears to understand the point.
“Halloween should be the new Valentine’s Day,” Inghram said. “Fall is underrated, because we’re dying.”
