Honestly, what even is college? Booze? Random hookups? A whole lotta random people living with you? Classes with crazy hard professors? Classes with crazy dumb professors? Really shitty food? It’s a lot—a lot to navigate and especially as a new baby freshman. Yup, y’all are babies. Now imagine on top of all this chaos, you have a significant other.
This commitment brings along emotions and drains your mental energy commitment.
On top of that it is a crazy erratic time commitment. Sounds super great right?
Let’s say you have a 9 a.m. class. You wake up groggy and exhausted because you’ve been up texting your girlfriend. You roll out of bed and start thinking about how you have three classes today… and after class ends at 1 p.m. you need to eat lunch and do homework. Sh*t. Now you’re stressing about homework. You groan and try to remember everything you on your to-do list. Now your mind drifts off to Netflix and you think about your favorite TV show and how you’d just love to sit and binge today.
Meanwhile you remember how your girlfriend asked you to get dinner, workout with her and to do homework with her…
This whole new person just came into your life expecting to live in it. I mean freshman year is awesome. You meet so many insanely cool people, get to learn a lot of interesting stuff, and find out a lot about yourself. It’s tough when you need to do this for two people. And I know it from experience too.
Boyfriends… Girlfriends… They’re freakin’ awesome. Not to be a hypocrite (oops) but I started dating someone freshman year. And I’m not gonna lie, it was tough.
I only got through it with the mindset that college marked a critical time for us to discover who we are and take advantage of all our opportunities. So I just accepted that’s what he was doing. And at the end of the day my life and my college career came way, way before him.
But now who wants a relationship where you only get a quarter of a person or just a fifth of their attention and time? Who wants a relationship where the person can barely be there for you?
I asked two of my senior friends about dating freshman year. One, a Boston College senior, said she’d dated someone her freshman year and it didn’t go well. If she could redo her freshman year, she’d reconsider that relationship.
My other friend just lived up the single life her freshman year. She said she remembers so many of her girlfriends being burdened down by their boyfriends. They missed out on great parties and bonding time with their friend group.
Moral of the story: it’s just bad timing.
Coming into school you’re just bombarded with novelty. Everything completely stunned and excited me.
At orientation, some seniors gave us advice and tell us specifically that they don’t recommend dating when you’re a freshman.
Guess what I did? I got myself a boyfriend as a freshman. Well done, Carolina. Shout out to Matt! We’re still together, but it was not easy. Many other couples broke up or just went through problems that impacted their school work and friendships.
And then some couples put all their time and energy into each other, totally blocking out the world around them. This just makes your freshman year the opposite of what you want.
Instead of finding lots of new cool friends, getting to know the campus and school, you’re stuck in a little bubble with this one other person who, odds are, you’ll probably end up hating.
As a freshman it’s just best to focus on finding a bomb friend group. Your happily ever after will still come, just at a better time.
