Making out with a guy at a party, then finding out the next morning that he also made out with your so-called best friend after you left. Getting back at him with his best friend the next night. Dating a new person a week after a “devastating” break-up. Cutting off all your hair between boyfriends. A jealous fit. Making out with that guy. Spending inordinate amounts of time at so-and-so’s apartment. Drunkenly blabbing a secret fondness for someone in the bathroom line.

These things, readers, I know. And so do you. We also know that feeling, Monday morning, back again in the world of the adult and responsible, when everyone seems to know What You Have Done. And talked about it at length. Ooooeerr.

Gossip: can’t live with it, can’t live without it.

Actually, scratch that. Gossip: you absolutely can’t live without it. Sure, that knowing look isn’t a reassuring one, but we, the species endowed with the ever-complicating faculty of language and a penchant for bonding, need gossip. We need to know everyone else’s business.

From alcohol-fueled scandals to peculiar personal details, we relish information about our peers. We need to know who hooks up and why. We need to know that he eats his toenails and is always on Dean’s List. We need to know that she is actually falling in love. We need to know her parents are living in Zaire.

Putting stories to faces gives people shape. It makes them more than another North-Faced, book-laden shadow climbing up the Slope. It makes them more interesting, more real — more peopley.

A quick foray into our library’s resources reveals a healthy amount of scholarship on gossip as a social and cultural phenomenon. A Professor Gluckman (of New Zealand’s University of Otago) says that gossip “crystallize[s] and reinforce[s] community values, thereby furthering the coherence and unity of the social group.” We like the feeling of belonging, so we share information about each other. We identify with details and decisions in other people’s lives. Exchanging information builds trust, intimacy and a host of other social bonuses that have defined and refined us as human beings.

On the other hand, gossiping has long carried the connotation of telling tall tales or speaking poorly of someone. Defamation, bitching, the annihilation of a reputation — that sort of thing. I’m inclined to believe that this is caused by inherent meanness and boredom. However, Professor Paine (another Kiwi) said, “[Gossip] must be referable to the individual … it is information that forwards or protects individual self-interest.” Reading anthropologically has a way of making our world resemble a David Attenborough nature program. You know those, with the monkeys, screeching, chittering, grooming, attacking, rubbin’ and lovin’.

Gossiping goes way back, my friends.

I grew up in a small, tight-knit community in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where there was no such thing as privacy. In high school, my grandparents would know that I would be hungover before I did. Everyone had something to talk about in first period. It could get annoying, but I missed it terribly when I came to Cornell. I found people to be discreet. Serious. Cautious. There was no easy-breezy chit-chat about neighbors at lunchtime. People were respectful, sometimes awkward. Fiercely missing my chatty, enveloping home, I milked people for stories. I got called a gossip several times.

It is somewhat understandable in college, where thousands of students are living alone and fending for themselves for the first time. It’s natural to be private and guarded. You are training yourselves to be independent and self-sufficient. The competitive environment discourages overt social risk-taking. Aside from the caffeinated crabbiness, people are generally pretty nice — polite. As you climb through sophomore, junior and senior year, you find a once-amorphous social life shrinking and assuming a certain orbit. To be quite cold and analytical, you begin to gravitate around each other as you learn and identify with the details and decisions people have made and become firmer friends with them.

Yet there still seems to be a want for a “cohesive community.” Facebook spread like wildfire when I was a sophomore, and I have not tired of it since. I check it several times a day, to see new pictures, favorite books, relationships, see whose friends are whose. Let’s not be embarrassed about Facebook stalking. Everyone does it.

Celebrity gossip is another example — I satisfy my cravings with a regular fix of US Weekly (I really should get a subscription) and perezhilton.com (bookmarked!) Following the lives of the rich and famous, interspersed with cooing or bitchy commentary, make them your new friends. Sections like “Celebrities! They’re just like us!,” where one can find the ubiquitous revolting mid-cheesburger-chomp, supermarket-shopping and dog-walking photographs, make you feel especially close to them.

I get teased incessantly for my vice, but when people come to my apartment, they can never resist my glossy, star-festooned rag. It should be noted that a recent spike in media gossip is not only related to the obvious boom of personal internet use, but also to the 21 percent increase in single-person households since 1990. Retreating into the pixilated, photographed lives of movie stars, however, hardly seems healthy.

Gossiping is a social mechanism that lives and breathes and walks with you. Your friends, neighbors and classmates are your celebrities! People talking shit? It happens. It’ll make you tougher. Judgment, in moderation, is normal. The small personal joys of your friends? The sympathies? The silly problems? The humiliations? The hilarious stories? I know these things. So do you. Put your magazine down, get off the Internet, get out of the house and talk to each other about each other. Prudence, begone! Waggle your tongues! It’s only natural!

Erin Geld is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at esg24@cornell.edu. The Sampling appears alternate Wednesdays.