College is a time to settle down in a major, settle down in a career and settle down into a plan, but is it the time to start to settle down with the person you’ll spend the rest of your life with?
We are taught the goal of dating is to find that one special someone and later go on to spend the rest of your merry days together. There are books, movies and a hell of a lot of songs dedicated to outsmarting the game and finding true love. We’re bombarded with success stories and conditioned to fear failure.
Make no mistake – the stakes are higher now. Most of us will graduate at the ripe old age of 23. That’s seven years away from 30. Ten years after that we’ll be 40 with a career blazing ahead. Who’s going to have the time to find anyone then? It’s now or never.
The future aside, who even has the time to find someone now in the midst of a schedule that’s full of few breaks, co-op and lots of work? If you are one of the lucky few to have already started to settle down, how do you plan to navigate your relationship through the sea of stressful finals, study abroad and possibly even transfers?
The problem with dating in college is that since most students are at a crossroads, a five-year alternate reality, that it’s difficult to start to cement plans for the future based on these current, temporary situations. Now, I am in Boston, dating someone else in Boston who is three years my senior. This set-up seems perfect for now, but what happens when my significant other graduates and may no longer be in Boston where I still am?
And what’s more is with most of our futures being quite unclear, especially when it comes to location, how is it even possible to plan a future for yourself, let alone around someone else’s plans?
Going through the co-op process now and looking toward future career prospects, I am fairly uncertain where in the world I will be in the next few years. Planning my future around where the best job opportunities are and where I would be least likely to go completely crazy is hard enough, but to factor my significant other’s desires into the picture has got me completely stumped.
Suddenly, I’m thinking about where I want to settle down, raise a family, what kind of dog I want to have, what kind of house I’m going to live in, if I need a mortgage, how I will pay off all my student loans and other weighty queries. It’s enough to push me into alcoholism, but I’m not even 21 years old yet.
When did we start to feel the pressure to jump into marriage and start a family already?
I look at the generation before us. Our parents, mostly, were in their 20s when they married. Many had children in their 20s as well; same for the generation before them. The only difference is that these were the generations that weren’t all off at college and working toward careers.
The times, as they say, are changing. Marriages and pregnancies are happening later, but while it may be easy to plaster that on the cover of Cosmo or on some fancy bar graph, how easy is it to apply it to our lives?
If we abandon the conventional dating models, then what is the point of dating now? If we decide to put off finding potential soul mates until we’re more stable, it seems like there’s an expiration date on whatever we find now.
Is the point of college dating not to find Mr. or Ms. Right but to find Mr. or Ms. Right Now, and what happens when you find the right person right now? You can’t just put them on lay away until things settle down.
Trying to plan out the details of love four years down the road is about as successful as trying to plan your future career: there are no guarantees. Love in college, like love anywhere else, is a risk. There is no clear solution or perfect plan for happiness.
But disregard what those baby boomers, who are appalled by unwed 30-year-olds and those who gave away good things due to bad timing say, because I can guarantee that the only real answer is to find what’s best for you.
