Cognitive Dissonance at That Traffic Light Freshers Party

I wore yellow on purpose. That is the first thing, and it still makes me smile in a way that is not entirely kind to my younger self. Yellow at a traffic light party is the coward’s colour if you are feeling ungenerous, and the honest colour if you are paying attention. Red means taken. Green means come over. Yellow means I have not decided what I am available for, or I have decided too many things at once and I would rather not lie about it under cheap lighting.

Freshers Week at Essex had that particular campus smell of new bedding and warm lager and the faintly sweet chemical tang of UV paint from the night before. Sub Zero still had the sticky floor. People were introducing themselves with their course and their hall as if that were a personality. I was Mathematics, first year, already slightly too pleased with the fact that I could hold a proof and still want to dance. A traffic light party was exactly the sort of crude social technology that should have irritated me. Instead I stood in front of the mirror in my room and chose yellow like it was a hypothesis.

I told myself it was an experiment. That is what you say when you are eighteen or nineteen and you would like your contradictions to look like method. Green felt like a billboard. Red felt like a lie, because I was not taken, not in any sense that would have survived a follow-up question. Yellow was the only colour that admitted the mess. I wanted to be looked at. I also wanted to be left alone long enough to finish a thought. I wanted the heat of a crowded room. I also wanted the boy from my stats module to explain, again, how he was thinking about variance, because the way his face changed when he got to the interesting bit did something to me that the music was only approximating.

Cognitive dissonance is not a party trick. Festinger’s idea, stripped of the textbook politeness, is this: when you hold two beliefs that cannot sit together without scraping, you feel a specific discomfort, and you will do almost anything to make the scraping stop. Change a belief. Change a behaviour. Add a third thought that lets both original thoughts keep their dignity. People talk about it as if it were a flaw in reasoning. I have always thought of it as a description of being awake.

That night I was a walking illustration. I wanted sex to be possible without being inevitable. I wanted to look like someone who went out, because I did go out, and I did not want to look like someone whose entire personality was the going out. I wanted to be from Essex without performing the cartoon. I wanted a first-class brain and a dress that made sense under body glitter. None of that is actually incompatible. The culture around girls, especially then, kept insisting that it was. Pick a lane. Be the clever one or the game one. Be serious or be wanted. The yellow was me refusing the pick, and then immediately feeling the scrape of that refusal.

He found me near the edge of the room, which is where the people who still want to talk always migrate when the bass starts making syntax optional. Stats module. Darkish hair. The expression of someone who had come out because everyone else had and was now hunting for a corner that felt like a seminar. I said something about the colour code being a forced choice with a fake third option. He laughed in the surprised way people laugh when they have not decided whether you are joking. I was not, not entirely.

We talked about cognitive dissonance because of course we did. It was right there, in the plastic beads and the traffic light logic and the girl in green who kept looking at the door and the girl in red who was kissing someone who was not the person the red was supposed to represent. He said yellow was cheating. I said yellow was the only colour that did not require you to falsify your data. He said that was a very maths way of defending indecision. I said indecision and honesty are not the same distribution.

I can still see the cheap stamp on the back of my hand. I can still feel the particular heat of a first-term room where nobody has learned yet how to leave when they are bored. What I cannot romanticise, and I have tried, is the part of me that kept scanning the floor for a different kind of night while also leaning closer to him because the conversation had become the night. Wanting two stages at once. The mind as the main act. The body as the understudy who has learned all the lines anyway.

Women get trained early to treat that split as a character problem. If you want the lecture and the dance floor, you are confused. If you want to be chosen and also want to go home alone, you are playing games. If you wear yellow, you are wasting everyone’s time. The moral is always consistency, and the consistency they mean is simplicity. One desire, clearly labelled, preferably one that makes you easy to sort.

I have never been easy to sort. That is not a boast. It has cost me evenings and a couple of almost-relationships and the patience of people who like their women to come with a key. It has also saved me from a life spent performing a single appetite I did not have.

The boy from stats was not a villain and he was not a great love. He was a specific person in a specific room, which is already more than most Freshers stories deserve. We did not follow the colour code. We followed the thread of the argument until the argument became an excuse to stay near each other. At some point his knee was against my knee and neither of us moved it. That is its own kind of data. Cognitive dissonance again: I had told myself I came out to observe, and my body had signed a different register.

I did not sleep with him that night. I need to say that, because there is a version of this story that only works if yellow becomes green at 2 a.m. and the essay can congratulate itself for being sexually frank. Sometimes the interesting night is the one where you walk across the park afterward with your shoes in your hand, still talking, still not touching much, and the dissonance does not resolve into a bed. It resolves into a feeling you will keep. I have a private list of nights that changed the weather inside me. That one is on it, and it is on it because I did not force the ending to match either of the stories I had arrived with.

University of Essex, Colchester, Wivenhoe Park at an hour when the water looks like it is thinking. If you have been there you know the particular quiet after campus noise, the way the cold makes you newly precise. He said something about how people reduce dissonance by deciding the thing they did not choose was never worth having. Sour grapes with better footnotes. I said that is why women rewrite their own want after a disappointing man. You cannot bear the scrape of I wanted him and he was not available, so you add a third thought: I did not really want him. The discomfort drops. So does your access to your own appetite.

I think about that walk whenever I watch a friend talk herself out of a desire that has not been reciprocated cleanly. We are excellent at the third thought. We call it growth. Sometimes it is growth. Sometimes it is just Festinger in a nice coat.

Traffic light parties are silly. Of course they are. They are also a diagram of how women get asked to broadcast availability as if it were a public utility. Green: I am a resource. Red: I am already allocated. Yellow: error message. The whole game assumes that your status is the most useful thing about you, and that other people are entitled to read it at a distance without having to do any of the work of asking. I disliked that even when I was enjoying the night. I still dislike it. Ask me. Do not colour-code me.

And yet I used the code. That is the dissonance I cannot outsource to culture. I wanted the protection of a signal and the freedom of not being signalled. I wanted to be seen as choosy and as open. I wanted the boy and the option of other boys and the moral high ground of being above all that. Eighteen is allowed to be greedy. What I will not do now is pretend the greed was accidental.

If I am writing this for you, it is because I keep meeting women who are living in yellow while insisting they are green or red. You say you want something casual and then feel quietly devastated when it stays casual. You say you want a relationship and then flinch when someone offers consistency because consistency would require you to stop keeping a side door open in your head. You say you are over him and then reconstruct him from crumbs. The scrape is not proof that you are broken. The scrape is the alarm that two true things are in the room together.

I want depth. I also want a night that is only a night. I want to be loyal to close people. I also want the particular Essex warmth of making a friend in the ladies’ queue and never seeing her again. I want a man who can match me intellectually and physically. I also, on some evenings, want to go home to my own bed and the private pleasure of not having to be impressive. None of that requires a traffic light. It requires sentences.

The exhausting part is the pretence of unity. Women are still praised for being “clear,” which often means being simple enough to date without effort. Be the girl who knows what she wants, they say, as if wanting were a single object you could put in a bag. I know what I want in the way I know weather. There is a prevailing pattern. There are days. Anyone who needs me to be one temperature for six months so he can relax is not matching me. He is asking me to become easier data.

I use psychological language because it fits, not because I want to diagnose a dance floor. Availability heuristic: the most recent night becomes the whole story of what you are like. One green evening and you are “that sort of girl.” One yellow conversation and you are difficult. Confirmation bias: he decided you were playing games when you wore yellow, so every later hesitation becomes evidence. I have watched men do that with a speed that would be impressive if it were not so lazy. I have done it to myself. I have taken one contradictory night and turned it into a personality, usually a personality I then tried to punish.

Here is a kinder reading. You can want to be desired and still need to test whether the desire can tolerate your mind. You can go out in a dress that makes you feel like yourself and still spend half the night on cognitive dissonance and standard deviation. You can kiss someone and leave. You can not kiss someone and still call it a good night. You can be from Chelmsford-and-Southend family roots and still care about mathematical elegance. The cartoon cannot hold all of that, which is the cartoon’s problem.

I make an effort with my appearance because I enjoy it. That night I enjoyed the yellow even as I resented the system that made yellow necessary. Both can sit together. Enjoyment does not cancel critique. Critique does not cancel the fact that I wanted to look well in bad light. People who need women to be either vain or above vanity are asking for a simpler animal than the one they are dating.

What happened to the stats boy, since you will ask. We had a stretch of talking. Library lights, the long tables, that slightly performative hush. A walk I have already given you. We did not become a couple. We did not become a disaster. We became a reference point, which is an underrated outcome. Sometimes a person exists in your life to prove that the conversation you want is not imaginary. After that, the work is finding it again without abandoning the rest of yourself to keep it.

I have had the other kind of night too. Dancing until my feet hurt. FED Wednesdays after sports socials, cheap drinks, kit energy turning into something messier. A Chelmsford evening that ended in a club that no longer exists and chips in the taxi queue and a sunrise that felt earned. Those nights were green in spirit even when nobody was wearing the colour. They were simple in the way heat is simple. I do not disown them to make this essay more respectable. The dissonance is not between “good girl” and “game girl.” It is between the wish to be one story and the fact of being several.

If you are tired, it may not be because you want too much. It may be because you have been trying to sand your wants until they do not scrape against each other. That sanding reads as maturity. It is often just exhaustion with better vocabulary. I would rather keep the scrape and get precise about it. I want X tonight. I want Y in general. X and Y will not always share a diary slot. That does not make me dishonest. It makes me scheduled like a human.

Ask better questions of yourself than the traffic light allows. Not “am I available.” Available to whom, for what, until when, with what left of me in the morning. Not “do I want him.” Want him in the dark, or want him in the daylight narrative as well. Not “why am I like this.” Like what. Like a person who can hold a proof and a pulse in the same body. Congratulations. That is not a pathology.

I still count things when I am anxious. Tiles, steps, beats. At that party I counted yellow stickers on strangers as if the sample would tell me whether I had chosen correctly. It would not. Samples of other people’s signals do not resolve your own. They only make the room look like evidence.

The older trick, the one I use now, is to let the two thoughts stay in the room without immediately appointing a winner. I want to leave. I also want to stay for one more song. Stay, then, and leave after the song, and do not write a thesis on the stairs. I want him to text. I also want not to wait. Put the phone in another room and go and do something with your actual hands. I want a relationship that can say its name. I also want evenings that belong only to me. Book both. Stop making one of them the secret.

Cognitive dissonance becomes dangerous when you resolve it by exiling a true thing. The exile is usually the want that would make you harder to love at speed. Women exile that one first. We keep the want that photographs well. We put the complicated yellow in a drawer and then feel mysteriously flattened in relationships that should, on paper, be fine. Of course they feel fine. You removed the part of you that had edges.

I am not telling you to be chaotic. I am telling you to stop calling your complexity a branding problem. A well-cut dress can hold more than one intention. So can a night. So can you.

Yellow, if I were doing it again, I would still wear. I might skip the party. I might not. I would talk about dissonance with anyone who could keep up, and I would dance when the song arrived that I did not know I loved, and I would not apologise to the colour code for failing to be a single light. The code was always a children’s version of consent and desire. Real adult signalling is speech. It is “I like you and I am not staying.” It is “come home with me and in the morning we will say what this was.” It is “not tonight, walk me part of the way anyway.”

That last one is underrated. You can want company and not want the whole plot. You can want the plot and not want it with this cast. You can change your mind when new data arrives, which is not flaking. It is updating. Anyone who has done a first-class maths degree should be allowed to update. Anyone who has not should be allowed to as well.

I think of that night as the first time I understood I could hold a room with both a proof and a story. The proof was the argument. The story was the yellow. Together they made me specific. Specific is what I have been chasing ever since, in work, in sex, in the kind of love that does not need me to pick a lane so the other person can relax.

If you take anything from a silly campus ritual and a boy who could talk about variance, take this. Wanting two things at once is not the scandal. Pretending you do not is the part that will tire you out. The scrape is information. Do not rush to oil it away just so you look consistent in bad lighting.

Wear whatever colour you actually mean. Then use your mouth, because colours are lazy, and you are not.