College love is a blessed thing. Common ground is easy to find with any potential mate. Options fairly force themselves on you (sometimes in a good way, sometimes not so much). And the stakes are so deliciously low, you can mess up with few consequences a semester abroad can't fix.

And then, on graduation day, it all ends. The tassels come off, and you discover a whole new, totally unwelcome aspect of romance: effort. Love will never be the same.

This fact was made painfully clear Friday night at an event hosted by the Ivy Singles Social Club of Washington, which our D.C. bureau chief felt obligated to crash. The largish crowd gathered on the top floor of a Spanish restaurant in Arlington.

A quick glance around the room put the average age at about 45. On the youthful end, you had a few recent post-docs, lawyers, consultants, many of them new to town. On the mature end, you had the fixtures -- people who had been attending Ivy singles events for years. Needless to say, these were not silver foxes. Makeup: caked. Hair: radioactive yellow. And when God was handing out bald spots, this group got a generous helping. We have a full head (for now) and felt like jailbait. One sweet woman did buy us a beer, but alas we forgot our permit for cougar-hunting.

Even among the veterans, the social rules of middle school dances held strong. Women huddled together, while a few stray men sipped their drinks against the wall, just sort of peering. Conversation was expectedly awkward. Lots about the event itself -- "Did you hear about the couple that met at one of these and got married?" Only one topic was off limits: graduation year. We touched this third rail a few times before realizing a gentleman never asks. At one point, a female friend of ours started talking to an older man, who volunteered that his passions were "tennis, beaches, and women." She asked if he preferred them in any particular order. "Depends which one I've had most recently," he replied. She excused herself as the conversation turned to surgery.

Throughout the evening, one horrifying thought loomed: in 20 years (or 10, or now), who among us will be attending these functions? The idea of using your school as a romantic crutch is upsetting -- until you realize you already do it all the time. Think about it: Events like this are like Facebook for people who don't know about the Internet. Our poke is their business card exchange. Still, though, there's sure to come a time when our diploma is -- yikes -- the sexiest thing about us. And suddenly, listing our passions to pretty young things at all-Ivy functions will seem like the most sensible move in the world. Tennis. Beaches. Women.