Think of friends with whom you’ve had a weekend-long sleepover, with whom you’ve gone on a road trip, or participated in a workshop, or talked all night. The normal social rules are slightly altered by a period of openness and intimacy. That really can build love.

At their very best this is what initiations can be: Spaces where the normal rigidity of Harvard social life breaks down. Spaces to experiment, to open up to each other in new ways, to be vulnerable, to be weird.

But this is only accomplished with incredible conscientiousness. Because we do things in groups, and in secret, that we wouldn’t otherwise do. And the promise of belonging is such a heady reward, even when initiation activities are “optional,” it can be hard to say no.

There’s another belief that underlies hazing, the darker side of initiations. We haze, a friend of mine said, because “hardship creates community.”

This is just flat-out wrong.

Here’s the thing about hardship: It’s hard. I don’t mean “boohoo, I’m a millennial who grew up getting trophies for participation and I don’t want to be challenged.”

I mean that the world is already brimming with hardship. There is hardship happening right here, right now.

And frankly, hardship sucks. I made some of my best friends during periods of hardship. I was also a boring, sniveling, traumatized mess. And a lot of my relationships suffered, or ended.

Hardship doesn’t happen because someone decides to impose it upon us for our personal growth. Hardship, genuine hardship, is arbitrary, and often structural, and gives no shits about our personal growth.

Hardship tears us down.

For a lot of us, Harvard itself is a four-year hazing process. For students who have to learn alien class norms. For students who feel like they’re leaving their families and communities behind. For students struggling with depression, with racism, with intimate partner violence. And in the hazing process that is Harvard—in the hazing process that is life—the stakes are very, very high.

When people drop out of this hazing process, we don’t always get them back.

If we’re forced to choose between feeling like we belong and respecting the dignity of ourselves and others, then I say: Fuck belonging.

But we don’t have to choose.

Transformative, creative experiences of intimacy and community can coexist with physical and mental respect. In fact, it’s only when they coexist that we make our communities strong.