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First, I'm surprised even more than one person on this board went to UA at all.
The consequences of not being Greek at UA are significant. Higher than any other university I had first or second-hand experience with, and it's not close. The GDIs, from my experience, had far more serious problems with hardcore drug use and graduating on time or at all. Such a huge percentage of people are in a sorority or Frat, or perhaps a hanger-on just one degree removed, that those who aren't in a greek org have a tough time.
The madonna-whore complex of sororities and their purposeful submission to degenerate predators in every frat has always been fascinating to me. On one hand, every single sorority girl I "got involved with" or simply knew truly as a friend had some sort of borderline-rape or outright rape experience. Frats with too high of a concentration of rapists would get a reputation that would be passed around campus.
...But then women would still show up at the parties. And there was a lot of consent to go around. Being tag-teamed or serially fucking members of the same frat - sometimes multiple in a night - was common enough. The bottom line is that once you give sexuality the cover of secrecy by controlling the dissemination of information about it, both men and women in their sexual prime will act radically differently than the baseline. Pretending to be Madonna lets you be a Whore, and lets your mom pretend she wasn't pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable way back when while mailing in the checks.
For what it's worth, there's some utility to be gained from running through an org of prospective partners that already coalesce around a certain personality type. When you're getting your Mr/Mrs degree a lot of these people were able to fine-tune their taste and lock down a high-quality partner early on. There's a role of the "Old dating couple" in Greek Life as eyes in the hurricanes of drama around them.
But in many ways, this was all downstream of the culture of the romantic southeastern culture writ large. An average SEC couple is a beauty queen and a beer belly with a job in logistics. The first time a sorority girl slept over and was fascinated by my bookshelf and gaming computer, it was flattering. By the 5th or 6th time, it was just kind of a bummer.
I am originally from Tennessee, and UT is the SEC school there; I wonder how similar the experience is. Throughout the state, there is this sort of low-level obsession with UT; when I tell people I'm from Tennessee, even now, they say, "Oh, did you go to UT?" even though I grew up 200 miles away from UT's campus.
Then as now, I was not interested in the "SEC lifestyle." It all sounded like a very poor match for my own personality, and I never even considered going there, though many people from my high school did. I ended up going to a much calmer public university in Tennessee; one which had a Greek life, but where the Greek life was not the center of all social life by any means. There, I was able to just nerd out and focus on academics in relative peace. I made friends and found romantic interests through "normal" channels - through classes, campus clubs, intramural sports etc. After various twists and turns, I am living the normal middle-class lifestyle of a State U grad.
I wonder where I'd go if I'd grown up in similar circumstances in Alabama. Maybe UAB? Or UNA?
I feel like even now, I mix more often with people that, like me, went to places like Northern Alabama, Northern Kentucky, UT-Chattanooga or whatever than I do with Ohio State/Michigan/Alabama/Duke sort of people. I'd be keen to read more about that kind of social sorting. I probably missed out some access to elites, but I don't think I belong in that stratum anyway.
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Listen, I'm just saying, it doesn't sound like you did that bad at UA bro, despite your lack of Greek Letters.
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