Falling in Love During Exam Season — The Most Chaotic Mistake I Made at IIT

I want to be clear that I am not writing this as a cautionary tale, because cautionary tales about love at IIT always have this slightly smug quality of implying that the writer was too smart to fall for something so irrational. I was not too smart. I fell for it completely and I have no regrets, mostly.

His name was Kabir. He was a Physics major. We had been in the same batch for two years without ever really speaking, and then somehow ended up at the same table in the library during end-semester exams in our second year. He was working through quantum mechanics. I was working through real analysis. We bonded over the fact that both of our professors explained things in a way that seemed specifically designed to create confusion.

How It Actually Started

We studied together for three days. By the end of the exam week we were eating together at the mess. By the week after that we were talking until 2 AM most nights about things that had nothing to do with studying. I remember thinking, 'this is probably a terrible idea given that we have exams in two weeks,' and then going back to the conversation anyway. My real analysis score suffered. I do not regret this either.

What followed was eight months that were, genuinely, some of the best months of my time at IITK. It was also sometimes destabilising in ways I did not fully understand while they were happening. We were both in high-pressure programs. We were both the kind of people who took things seriously. This was what we had in common and also what made conflict, when it came, feel disproportionately heavy.

What I Learned About Relationships Specifically in the IIT Context

IIT relationships exist in a strange compressed time where you see each other constantly, share most of your social context, and are simultaneously under the kind of academic and career pressure that turns normally reasonable people into anxious versions of themselves during placement season. I am not saying it is impossible. I am saying it requires a level of deliberate communication that I did not know I needed until I did not have it.

We broke up eight months in. It was mutual, not dramatic, and not because anything went wrong exactly. We were going in different directions — he had decided to pursue a research path, I was going into industry — and we both understood that the version of us that worked during college might not work outside it. We are still friends, which took about four months of not being friends first.

If someone asked me now whether to pursue a relationship at IIT I would say: probably yes, with clear eyes about the context you are doing it in. The compressed intensity of campus life makes some things feel bigger than they are and some feelings feel smaller because you are too busy to examine them. Both of these are real, and neither of them means the connection is not worth having.