The MBA Romance is Dead

No, my scientifically researched conclusion is unrelated to the fact I am single.

When I started speaking to people for this article, I think they assumed that this would be a piece of investigative journalism and that, after turning up all the cobblestones on Spangler Lawn and searching every nook in Aldrich, I would emerge with the equivalent of a Victorian book on etiquette for courting at HBS. That is not so. This, at its heart, is personal. I started writing this article because every day, when I wake up to the thin, graying morning light of fall, I sit in bed for five minutes, reconciling myself to the small acts of strength it will take to get through the day alone. What friendship and family does alleviate — and what partnership does not — is an intellectual argument. This feeling is visceral, beyond reason. It is the sense that, at this stage of my life, I expected there would be someone there.

Dating and relationships form an unspoken context underpinning the MBA experience. They constitute the one question that straddles just the right level of vulnerability and professional veneer to turn an acquaintance into a friend. The hapless “Section S” group which serves as a blatant advertisement in which everyone seems to participate, including those who never share an iota of information about their personal lives. Like an IPO red herring prospectus, a degree of dating disclosure is par for the course of being an MBA student.

The stage set at the MBA is one of conventional partnership — a stark contradiction to the selfishness of self-improvement at the heart of grad school. It’s one that says, “as you’re being groomed to be leaders in this world, please don’t forget about your family”, delivered uncertainly. 

“If I wanted to hear the KKR CEO speak about his wife for twenty minutes, I would have just taken LEAD again”, a disgruntled comment overheard after VC/PE. The Debbie Lovich BCG case, which felt uncomfortably close to listening to your two unhappily-together friends trade veiled snipes at a dinner party. The discussions in entrepreneurship and ETA around how to convince a partner. The “where do I see myself in ten years?” goals exercise. In the spirit of a borderline-intimate confession in LEAD that either “brings the section together” or earns it a reputation for (much-needed?) therapy, I found myself admitting that I didn’t see a clear enough vision of a partner to include in my goals. Also telling was how many people listed “being a good partner or parent” as a central goal. 

In the RC year, HBS appeals to your humanity to counterbalance your ambition against megalomania in only two ways: 1) by warning you not to commit outright fraud, and 2) by highlighting the importance of family and specifically, a partner. Maybe it’s no wonder I feel the absence of a relationship more keenly now.

The fairytale of the MBA relationship is fervently propagated. The romance at the end of the tunnel — for the career-focused people who haven’t had time to date, for those on the brink of commitment who chose this disruptive decision instead, or even for those whose horizons have widened at business school, the stage for reinvention. 

“Maybe I’ll find my girlfriend of seven years tomorrow,” a friend joked, alluding to the hope that we could find a “college sweetheart” in our simulated second youth.

Well, I think the dream’s dead.

The Pool is So Much Smaller Than You Think

About 60-65% of HBS students are currently dating, a metric that is similar across ECs (~180 surveyed), RCs (~90 surveyed), and men and women (equal number of respondents). Assuming it’s been similar since matriculating to HBS (with some breakups and some new relationships), that leaves roughly 360 single people per class.

“The section is the biggest cockblock in the first year. It feels like you only really get to know them. That takes the 500 women I thought I would meet down to 45, and if you assume only 40% are single, that leaves 18 options!” I couldn’t fault his math.

“I feel like there’s an RC-EC knowledge gap,” a friend said reflectively. “So it’s not like you get to know the other class well enough to date them.”

“75% of the HBS students on the Harvard Dating app appear to be international or non-white,” said Umer, an HKS alum and the founder of Harvard Dating. This adds another complication: wanting to date within your community, which is an even smaller and tighter-knit subgroup. I don’t think I can touch upon the complexities of race and community in dating in a few lines, so I will not attempt to; I will suffice by saying that many levels of visible and invisible ideas cut up a group of eligible peers into smaller ones where one feels comfortable connection, which was a new consideration to me, in America.

It’s All in the Timing

“If I don’t find someone in the next month, I don’t think it’ll be possible to find something serious at HBS,” said an EC in October, adding that he was using this last window to double down on dating. 

“It seems like most of the people I see on the Harvard Dating app, which launched this September, are RCs. I wonder if it’s harder to find something in the EC year, where time is limited and people are less willing to try,” mused Umer.

People blame dating apps for the illusion of optionality, but optionality is the curse of business school. The scarcity of time — highly prized and weighed down by loans — leads people to bail on section events for private parties and cancel long-scheduled dinners to cash in the golden-ticket invite of a sought-after acquaintance. People are constantly testing the water for “something better,” moving quickly from one thing to the next. 

“I go on a few dates, but then someone else catches her fancy, and it just fizzles out,” an acquaintance said in passing, which stayed with me because I was surprised to find that this problem cuts across all social circles at HBS. 

“We met at an HBS event, which snowballed quickly into texting and moved to an intimate place fast. Although my friends suggested I make friends first and keep the tension going, people have such short attention spans that I felt I had to move quickly.” 

“At HBS, a week can feel like a month. With so much tension and inherent excitement, you create this big story for what it could be. ‘Oh, I met my husband at HBS!’ is not a very stable way to start something.”

Dating in the Membership Network

“When I first came to HBS, I was struck by how kind everyone was. I later realized true kindness is rarer — that people here are nice because you belong to ‘the club’ of HBS.” 

HBS straddles an odd place between the personal and the professional, where “building a network” can mean getting acquainted over a tequila shot. It’s a network so tightly woven that the indiscretions of the previous night travel faster than a firetruck responding to a false alarm. 

“You get three shots at finding someone at HBS. By EC year, any two people are second-degree connected. I can’t go on a date with someone and then ask out anyone in their presumably large circle of friends.”

“In New York, I can pursue multiple options to understand with whom I have a spark. Here, the bar for starting something is much higher. The people who keep putting out feelers end up with reputations as womanizers.”

“I feel like men in our class were scared to flirt. They didn’t want to come off as creeps,” an alum mentioned.

Many people opt out of dating at HBS altogether, preferring dating apps with a larger, disconnected pool allowing the weighing of each person standalone and the easier transaction of interest exchanged in a match..

“People are constantly putting out charged one-liners, flirting to see what’s out there rather than showing real interest.”

“I’ve gone for drinks with guys and exchanged texts late at night, but things peter out quickly. It feels like there’s a jitteriness towards taking the next step. That’s why I prefer meeting HBS people on Hinge. There’s a clear expression of interest in a match.”

Given this broad wariness towards engaging within HBS, I found myself slightly confused by the “hook-up” culture that is supposed to exist.

“I think the hook-up culture exists in a self-enabling way. If you believe it exists, you act like it exists,” an interviewee theorized. 

As I mentioned before, this is not investigative journalism. I haven’t been standing outside SFP 2 with a notebook at 7 a.m. counting how many people leave in last night’s wrinkled garb, so I can’t tell you how prevalent hook-ups are. From my conversations, Casanova-esque hook-ups seem relatively rare, but there are many stories of missed connections and mixed judgement.

I started this article after having slightly too-frank conversations with women about the wasted hellscape that is my dating life, to find many friends engaging in “the mental masturbation of why,”: “why didn’t he text after last night?”, or “why did he ask me out and never follow up?” I also discovered that I don’t have as many male friends having these conversations around me, so I started staking out single men wherever I could find them to get their opinions.

“Men are pigs,” said one evasively, “and you can quote me on it,” his eyes darting around for a reprieve in a crowded corner of Spangler. Truthfully, that is a singularly boring take that offers no answers.

With HBS’s fast-moving optionality culture, it feels like people have to take their shot at romance where they get it; even if it is at 3 am in a bar, at 12 am on someone’s sofa, “hardly the breeding ground for a relationship” a friend commented. And that’s where the fallacy of the “membership club” comes into play: when someone with whom you’ve debated across the classroom or organized an event or been to dinner makes a move, is it always read as an extension of the existing intellectual and emotional peerhood? Does it inherently feel like it could be the start of something “romantic”? I once read a Forbes article¹ about HBS that discussed the disconnect between dressing sexily outside the classroom and engaging as an intellectual within it, which, I feel, speaks to the same inability to divorce sexual identities from intellectual ones in this environment.

“We all spend so much time with each other here, but because people prize their time so highly,  any time spent feels like a ‘gesture,’ when, in fact, it’s just an artifact of that moment.”

Another friend told me that she avoids ambiguous, “low-effort” situations, like going to someone’s place alone during the initial “get-to-know-you” phase: “My boundaries are so loud that I think it puts people off unless it’s serious.” This is, in itself, clear communication from the other party - clear intention of a casual relationship, not a serious one, taking away any question of ambiguity. 

So, admittedly, some of these encounters are one-time sparks that were never meant to lead to something more. What’s next? The etiquette is unclear. Do you send a polite text the next day clarifying your intentions? Do you offer to Zelle 50% of a Plan B? Do you make a structured, researched, and long-winded comment in class to let the other person know that you’re unaffected by the previous night’s encounter, that you’re still an intellectual peer?

Where Did the Good Boys Go to Hide Away?

Initially, I wanted to steer clear of writing about men versus women in a heteronormative “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus” way (I once read another book by those authors called Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps and spent years feeling quietly vengeful about what I considered to be my excellent map-reading ability). But not even a month after my waitlist-converted admission to HBS, I was slammed with this article in The Cut² touting the benefits of an age-gap relationship, wherein a Harvard undergrad extols the virtues of her youth in snagging an HBS man and writes about his female classmates’ ages in an empathetic but reductive way.

For women, it’s hard to ignore the time pressure. 

“I guess I’ll see where life takes me and think about freezing my eggs next year,” a friend told me, which is something I also say as I try on the nonchalance for size because I’m scared of what it would mean for egg-freezing to be a necessary part of my plan. 

“I will still look 25 in twenty years and can have kids then, but for the women here, time is running out,” one man told me bluntly but honestly.

In a world where the common adage is that a woman has 100 Hinge matches and a man has three, is HBS the most level playing field, with its equal number of single men and women but a timeline pressure only on women?

“I think there are some women who are a little awkward with the whole idea of dating — of how to flirt — and are even uncomfortably touchy.” 

“It was kind of awkward to run into her in social settings even though we called it off amicably after a few dates. She would obviously ignore me.”

In a world where women make fewer first moves and face less rejection, HBS was the first time I had to confront the thought of making a move and grapple with the idea of what it meant to be unappealing. 

“It felt like women were just waiting to be approached at the Meet Market,” an interviewee complained a few weeks after a man told me, “if I liked you, wouldn’t I have just told you?”, highlighting the shifting sands of gender dynamics.

“Some women make dating such a central aspect of their personality. It’s off-putting,” one man added, joining the club of people worried about being labeled “so single” by their peers. 

And this goes even beyond HBS. A friend recently shared two New York Times articles  — “Men, Where Have You Gone?”³ and “Where Have Men Gone? We’re Right Here.”⁴ — both of which address the changing expectations of dating.

“Smart, ambitious, brilliant.” When I asked people why they were excited about dating at HBS, those were the qualities for which they are looking. For some women, that comes with an additional caveat: finding men who also understand their ambition. The difference between how male and female ambition is perceived could be an article on its own, but for now, I will quote this 2017 Harvard Gazette survey⁵: “Some women might feel it necessary to make a tradeoff in order to find a suitable mate, minimizing actions that signal ambition and assertiveness for fear of being deemed less desirable on the marriage market.”

The Abstract Idea of Wanting a Relationship

This brings us to the conclusions I’ve heard frequently: “Men just don’t want to commit to anything!” and its cousin, which I personally have heard less frequently, “women say they want something serious, but when it gets there, they pull back.” With a sample size of roughly 50 single men and 50 single women, about 90% of women and 80% of men said they were looking to date. The difference likely stems from timeline pressures as previously discussed, but the numbers are still high for both parties. 

“HBS people put in effort into their profiles,” Umer said. “They’re high-quality.” 

“I have friends who go on several dates a week. They put a lot of effort into it,” another friend added.

Most of my interviewees said they were looking for something serious. So what’s the catch?

An avid reader of “Modern Love,” I came across this surprisingly vulnerable essay⁶ by a GSB alum in favor of the “10% wrong relationship” and the idea of working on flawed relationships instead of waiting for “the perfect one.”

“If I’m going to date someone here, I want it to be because I really like them. Every time I choose to do something here, it feels like I am actively choosing not to do five other things.” 

The idea that HBS students have a high bar for what they deserve has also been tossed around, often in a contemptuous tone. 

“I’ve seen people ask ‘who are this person’s friends?’ as a way of understanding the social circles into which they fit. Isn’t it a little weird that, even within the 0.01% that is HBS, people still stratify further?”

Can you really find something 90% perfect in the span of a few short, intense meetings, or is having a high bar just functionally the same as being closed off to dating?

The hidden cost of broken relationships in this hypersocial, frenetic environment also feels higher, meriting the wariness.

“It’s so hard to determine what kind of person you’re dating at HBS when there are so many motivations and factors at play. It’s like you’re dating a manicured version of them.” 

If your assumptions about a person turn out to be wrong, where do you hide in this socially rigorous environment? Whom do you tell in this tightly-connected network? When do you grieve with such a full calendar? I had a fun, party-ready version of my worst story, all the way down to a punchline, within a week of it happening because there was no hiding away in my room, no chance that people hadn’t heard, and no way I was going to let it be anything other than a comic sidenote to my time here. Dating at HBS also doesn’t preclude one from being victim to the worst excesses of relationships, including abuse.

Unsurprisingly for a group who sometimes schedules two dinners and pre-dinner drinks in one night, the thinly sliced nuance of what commitment means for two people can also be a deal breaker. 

“Maybe she wants only 20% of my time, but I only want to give 10%.”

“Warily, he asked me what I was looking to get out of this [date], and I told him dinner and an orgasm. Nothing more complicated than that.”

Where Does All of This Leave Us?

About 20 of the 270 survey respondents (~100 of whom are single) said they found their partner at HBS — roughly 7% of the class and 16% of single students. That’s approximately three couples per section if we exclude cross-section couples. Compare that to a 2015 HBS alumni survey, which found that, among alumni between the ages of 25 and 30, 31% of married women and 16% of married men had wed an HBS alum (inflated versus the prior statistic since that includes couples who came to HBS together). I asked this question in the survey because, as I spoke to people, I was struck by how uncertain they seemed when sharing their experiences, with comments like “I don’t know if it’s just me” and “maybe people are having more success than I am” coming from people I consider incredible and with whom I’d never associate any kind of self-doubt. I think dating at business school is simply a more complex endeavor than we thought it would be.

Some months ago, I told my mom that, while I could find someone to date if I wanted to, the people I really liked didn’t seem to like me (framed as a logistical problem rather than a personal indictment); to which she said, “you have a choice now and many different paths you can take. When I was your age, it felt like marriage was the only next logical step.” 

To that I offer my pragmatic conclusion on this discussion around dating: much like evaluating a deal in PE Finance, know the bets you’re making. We’re lucky to be at a point in life where we can afford to not compromise, account for our personal growth in our search, and “forget about the search and decide that your partner will come when they come,” as one happily dating interviewee told me. If your thesis is that you’re looking for the best, then being single right now is “a feature, not a bug” — a functional outcome, not a personal failing. And one day, if the thesis changes and partnership becomes a focus of your life, you will plan around it accordingly, re-evaluating your trade-offs and redefining what success looks like.

---

¹ Kapadia, S., 2013. HBS Dress Code: Buttoned Up In Class, Unbuttoned Outside Of Class. Forbes.

² Christie, G. S., 2024. The Case For Marrying An Older Man. The Cut.

³ Drucker, R., 2025. Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back. Modern Love, The New York Times.

⁴ [Author Unknown], 2025. Where Have Men Gone? We’re Right Here. Modern Love, The New York Times.

⁵ Pazzanese, C., 2017  The internal marriage tax of women M.B.A.s.. Harvard Gazette.

⁶ Johnson, O., 2022. In Praise of the 10-Percent Wrong Relationship. Modern Love, The New York Times.

Ramya Vijayram (MBA ‘26) is originally from Chennai, India. She graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, with a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Biotechnology. Prior to the Harvard MBA, Ramya worked at Warburg Pincus in Mumbai, India, and McKinsey and Co. in India.