Lunch is a foundational part of the social community at Prep. It’s where you can meet up with friends and peers to foster relationships outside the classroom, bonding over the struggles of Algebra II Trig to talking about the upcoming sporting event. Every day, without even a bat of an eye, as the bell rings to let the second block of classes out, students divide themselves to It’s almost set in social stone where one goes to eat lunch: boys only in the Cafeteria, upperclassmen in the Great Room, and underclassmen in the Commons, throughout Ignatius, and Adelphia.
These lunch spots have become unnoticeably regulated not by formal policy but by social expectations. These divisions that repeat each day, stretching across every building on campus, have created a predictable map of where students belong. Rarely do students cross these boundaries, not because they are prohibited from choosing where to eat lunch but because doing so feels unnatural, almost like breaking an unwritten rule. This behavior is frequently studied in teens and labeled as normative social influence, which describes how people conform to group expectations in order to be liked, accepted, or avoid rejection. This influence can be very strong in peer groups, especially among adolescents.
This divide of students isn’t a new tradition, but it certainly isn’t an old one. From interviewing members of the Prep community, I found many faculty saying the lunch divide wasn’t as noticeable 8 to 10 years ago, so how did it come to be? According to teachers, the divide became most apparent after Prep returned to in-person learning in 2021, following Covid-19, as friend groups formed over Zoom remained closely aligned once back on campus. The girl groups gravitated toward where other girl groups of the same grade sat, and vice versa with the boys.
But this was over five years ago, why is the separation still as drastic? Much of it comes down to comfort, as sitting where you are expected to sit, dependent on grade and gender, removes the risk of awkwardness and judgment. Over time, what began as a casual choice to sit near friends has become the social norm, reinforced daily because it goes unchallenged. Emerson King ‘26 explained, “With varying grades and genders interacting in the same place at the same time each day, the social divide can feel more like a dependable routine rather than a separating burden.”
While this divide may seem convenient and harmless, it carries subtle consequences. When students consistently separate themselves by gender and grade, opportunities for connection and social learning disperse. This isn’t to say that familiarity is wrong, as many students value lunch as a time to relax and catch up with their peers they know best. Yet, when comfort becomes routine and routine becomes rule, social boundaries harden. What started as a preference has slowly limited exposure with the rest of the student body as well as reinforced the idea that certain spaces and people are not meant to mix.
The lunch divide at Prep is not enforced, but it is accepted. Students would never be asked to abandon their friends and disrupt their lunch routine, but awareness alone can begin to loosen what seems an unbreakable gender divide. This is already evident in the underclassmen’s behavior of spending the lunch period in Merlino, where grades and genders naturally overlap. Lunch will always be a space defined by comfort, but it can also be a space of choice. Recognizing this helps us see that comfort and choice do not have to be mutually exclusive.
