You’re stranded, standing in the hallway wondering what you’re going to do next. Only moments ago you’d been happily making your way to your room, ready to relax after a hard day’s work, and then you see it. How could this happen to you? It must be a mistake, right? Wrong. There’s only one reason for a strategically placed sock on the door handle — you’ve been sexiled.

Making the beast with two backs, bumping uglies, boning, boinking, doing “it,” taking the skin boat to tuna town — no matter what you call it, sex happens. It’s a natural occurrence, but the cramped conditions of dorm life give this age-old urge a new set of complications.

The touchy subject of the sock-on-the-door treatment elicits a variety of responses from roommates on the outside of the door. Many students have friends elsewhere in their dorms, so finding an alternative place to crash for a night isn’t a problem.

“It’s always easy to find another bed to sleep in,” said Katya Drobysheva ‘13.

But a main reservation among otherwise happily-sexiled students is the possibility of being sexiled too often — or during midterms.

“I totally wouldn’t mind, unless it was happening all the time,” said Alex Sambvani ‘12.

Problems can also arise when students absolutely must access their rooms. Students shared horror stories of the awkwardness that ensued when they simply needed their phones or homework assignments.

But in the modern sexiling era, the antiquated sock-on-the-door has been mostly replaced by the speedier, more direct text message.

Most students seem to be willing to give up their rooms as long as they’re given a bit of warning. But they expect roommate communication to be a two-way street. Others, however, aren’t accommodating.

“There are a lot of other places you can go,” said David Murguia ‘13. “You don’t have to take a girl back to your room.”

Other options include, of course, her room — but also the stacks, the post office and dorm common spaces.

“Yeah, we should just move a mattress into the computer cluster,” said Van Anh Tran ‘13. Both Tran and Murguia are residents of Larkin.

At Stanford, students are given relative freedom about when and how to sexile — it’s considered a roommate issue and not regulated at a higher level. That’s not the case at other universities.

Just last year, the Tufts administration enacted a policy stating that students were no longer allowed to exile their roommates to engage in sexual activity. Nor can students pursue sexual gratification when there is another, uninvolved party in the room.

With Stanford’s greater freedom comes greater roommate responsibility. On the Farm, the sexiling code of etiquette requires that sexilers give some notice to their roommates before hitting the hay with that special someone. The sexiled must maintain a sense of humor and take one for the collective team.

And, of course, please control that birthrate.