Dating in college and dating in Hollywood are actually really

In the marketplaces of youth and the glittering courts of fame, the same wind often scatters vows like dry leaves. So speaks Julia Stiles: “Dating in college and dating in Hollywood are actually really similar in that the relationships don’t last long. Other than that, lots of people in Hollywood tend to be narcissistic, and it’s hard to have a relationship with someone like that.” Hear the bell hidden within her words. It tolls for brevity, for brightness without warmth, for faces polished like shields that reflect everything and receive nothing. Beneath the wit lies an old warning: where the self is an altar, love finds no temple; where time is a game of auditions, commitment becomes a line forgotten between scenes.

In the halls of college, the season is swift—each year a caravan departing. Youth keeps its bags packed: majors change, cities call, and tomorrow is a bridge under construction. Hence many relationships turn to foam on the shore—beautiful in their break, gone in a breath. In Hollywood, the tempo is swifter still: the lamps burn all night, the mask-maker never sleeps, and attention is a currency that devalues each sunrise. In both worlds, the clock is louder than the heart, and so the relationships don’t last long; not because affection is false, but because roots cannot deepen in constantly overturned soil.

Yet Stiles names a deeper cut: the spirit of narcissistic hunger. The ancients knew this specter by story. Consider Narcissus at the silvered pool, beholding his image until all other faces perished from his hunger. Love is a dialogue, but the self-enchanted soul speaks only in monologue. To tie your life to such a one is to cast a net into a mirror—always a motion, never a catch. The relationship becomes a stage on which one actor refuses a partner and courts only the roar of invisible crowds.

Take a tale fit for our teaching. A young editor—call her Mara—met an actor at a festival of lights. He praised her as though she were a premiere, promised a forever that sounded like opening night. For a season she walked red carpets, but her words could not find a listening ear; every story she told became a cue for his next soliloquy. When she fell ill one winter, he sent flowers and a public post, then vanished before the tea cooled. She later married a man who asked more questions than he gave answers, who remembered that love is not applause but attendance. From Mara we learn: fame can decorate an absence; character furnishes a home.

History, too, bears witness. The poet Sappho sang of brief flames on Lesbos, of loves that came like comets—brilliant, vanishing. Rome’s own salons glittered with actors and patrons, yet the marriages that endured were those built in shadowed courtyards: shared bread, shared burdens, sacred boredom borne together. The lesson treads through centuries: constancy is forged offstage. Devotion survives where there is room for silence, for labor, for the unphotographed day.

What, then, shall we teach the young who wander these two bright provinces—college and Hollywood—or any realm where attention is coin and mirrors are many? Seek the one who prefers conversation to performance, reception to display. Test for humility the way sailors test for depth: drop questions and measure how far answers reach. Choose a heart that keeps appointments with the ordinary—laundry folded, calendars honored, kindness given without witnesses. Flee the house where every wall is a portrait of the owner.

Let the counsel be plain as noon. First, honor time: agree to a pace that allows roots—ritual calls, unhurried meals, honest rest. Second, prize character over charisma: look for patience, apology, follow-through. Third, set boundaries against the cult of the self: no pedestal, no priesthood; two pilgrims walking, not one deity carried. Fourth, apprentice yourselves to service—volunteer together, care for those who cannot repay; love grows sturdy when it lifts. Finally, make a covenant with truth: say what you mean, and mean it even when no spotlight warms your face. Do these things, and you will find that even in lands where relationships don’t last long, steadfast souls can build a harbor—safe from the bright, breaking surf of the narcissistic age.