I have a love-hate relationship with the emoticon. While I flirted briefly with emoticons in middle school, by high school the trend had gone out of fashion. Here at Stanford, they’re back in, and I’m not happy.

Just last year, the emoticon — a spectrum of smileys, that elusive trio of colon, dash and parenthesis — turned 25. This linguistic quirk, created by a CS professor at Carnegie Mellon, has survived AOL, Y2K, and an entire information revolution. Much as I hate it to admit it, it looks like the emoticon is here to stay.

The psychology behind emoticons is pretty straightforward: frowning parentheses, winking semi-colons, the kiss of an asterisk — all try to take the place of the facial expressions absent from our online conversations.

Thanks to hormonal surges and mood swings, our age group just can’t get enough of emoticons; after all, sarcasm and sexual innuendo are the stuff of our existence. And the college dynamic, rich with awkward acquaintances and ambiguously sexual relationships, is fertile soil for emoticons. But there’s deeper meaning beneath the surface. What we don’t realize is that, when we use emoticons, we are wearing our hearts — or in this case, our faces — on our sleeves.

At a place like Stanford, most students have a small circle of close friends, surrounded by a larger network of friendly acquaintances. Facebook’s strength — and a reason behind much of its success — is that it offers us a way to build and maintain these acquaintances. Yes, we write on the walls of our closest friends, but we also post notes to potential friends: people we meet at parties or in section, friends of our friends — even victims of our bike collisions. A smiley comes across as friendly and kind; a wink makes us seem playful, even flirtatious. A frown expresses sadness from a separation. We aren’t the smoothest of operators; Facebook takes away the social pressures that normally drench us in sweat.

Now, stir in our bizarre student romances. Fearing misinterpretation, we use the emoticon as a precautionary measure. When we don’t have the courage to put ourselves out there, we construct those half-jokes, half-come-ons, and punctuate them with a wink:

A: we really need to go see superbad again?u up for it?

B: of course! you?me?a dark theater? who knows what could happen? ;)

There is no secret decoder ring for emoticons, no Rosetta stone for our interpretation. There is no need: emoticons don’t just express emotion — they express a desperate desire to be liked. When I look back to posts at the beginning of freshman year, emoticons are everywhere. In each individual thread, as the friendship grows deeper, the emoticons gradually fade away. An emoticon user may want your friendship; they might be the kind of person who needs to feel liked by everyone. But chances are — and let’s be honest here — they probably just want to get into your pants.