Love is a tricky emotion, especially in college. There are just so many aspects of being a college student on which to focus. Our interests range from athletics, to arts, to academics and span all the places in between.
I become so passionate about so many things there is often a lack of space in which to melt into Justin Bieber-esque baby love. While it is important to focus on the here and now, maybe knowing when to get lost in a relationship is an admirable skill to have.
We all have a friend who is adorably smitten with her boo thang. I myself am thrilled at how happy he makes her, though I roll my eyes at the frequent calls, the use of endearments, etc, etc.
Still it is hard to look at these two people and not wonder how it is that anyone can be so irrevocably in love. College is a place of constant change. Year to year we grow, change majors, die our hair, start drinking espresso — whatever. We become different people. Knowing this, how can they possibly throw themselves head first into love?
Even when they do, surely one of them must burn the sugar eventually, and then what? Is this type of love even on the market for the majority of college students? Our lives here are semi-permanent at best, so are we even looking for this kind of love? Should we be?
I think ultimately we (and I’m broadly generalizing females here) are looking for the kind of love that comes with doe eyes and goodnight texts, though maybe we are selective with whom we can receive them from without abject annoyance. However, our current reality may be that this kind of love isn’t sustainable in a college environment, and maybe that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I have friends whose lives are categorized by relationships in a manner not dissimilar to the use of index fossils. It is easy to graph our lives into BSO (Before Significant Other) and ASO (After Significant Other).
We all know by now that you cannot name those papers you wrote freshman year with the same clarity you can recall the people you spent it with. Maybe that’s the answer there, maybe all life is stratified into relationships, sexual or otherwise. Due to the ephemeral nature of the dating game, sexual relationships have become a natural indicator of who you are and who you have been.
Though there are those who fall into goopy love in college, it might be that finding it here shouldn’t be the point. Perhaps we should stop judging our past relationships in terms of pass or fail, love or lust, but rather based on the marks left on each other.
So yes, our lives are transient. We are in a period of growth. We are constantly learning. So my answer is, the point of a relationship in college is not to be looking for wedding bells or even a Socratic other half. The point, like everything here, is growth.
A good college relationship should be about a partnership in which you are able to learn something, and it shouldn’t even matter what. Maybe you are learning about broomball, or maybe it is about what you don’t want in love. Maybe it’s about a different perspective on life or it could be about sex.
Boyfriends, girlfriends, the way the system is set up, the majority of us do not stay in each other’s lives post breakup. These are people we hold closely to us until one day we don’t, and that’s painful, that’s the risk.
When it comes to an end, when it seems like there is nowhere to go and you are both about to start different lives, as long as you have left each other somewhere better than where you started, that relationship is significant, and it always will be.
We can’t carry each other into every metamorphosis of self, but the journey is often more interesting than the destination anyway. If we accept that it is not about finding forever, but jumping at the significant things that pass us by, then maybe we will all be happier for it. As Raymond Dufayel, the Glass Man in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film “Amelie” says, “You don’t have bones of glass. You can take life’s knocks. If you let this chance pass, eventually, your heart will become as dry and brittle as my skeleton. So, go get him, for Pete’s sake!”
Arielle Egan is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences and a Fall 2012 columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at aegan@bu.edu.
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