?
“We met on the bus to a trip and he asked me out on a date for the following weekend. He’s always been such a gentleman. We were both really nervous for our first date.”-That’s how our parents tell us their love stories of college.
Fast forward to 2015>>
“OMG WHY IS HE NOT TEXTING ME BACK? URGH! I JUST CAN’T EVEN. WE’VE BEEN TALKING FOR ALMOST 3 MONTHS NOW AND NOW HE JUST DECIDES TO IGNORE ME FOR 7 HOURS? HOW COULD WE? THIS IS WHY I DIDN’T WANT TO LABEL IT. HE’S A JERK THANK GOD I DIDN’T. RELATIONSHIPS AREN’T FOR ME. SO DONE! I’M JUST TRYING TO HAVE A GOOD TIME”
“DUDE, SHE’S BEEN MIA FOR LIKE ALL DAY. SHE SAID SHE WENT SHOPPING AND NOW IT’S 10 PM AND ON HER SNAPCHAT SHE’S GOING OUT ALL DRESSED UP AND S***. WE’VE BEEN TALKING FOR 3 MONTHS NOW AND SHE DOESN’T EVEN CARE. OH WELL, I’LL JUST PARTY WITH HANNA TONIGHT. [1:30 AM] SCREW THIS! I’M TEXTING HER “What’s up?”…[2:00 AM] SHE’S A SLUT. I’M OVER THIS. THANK GOD, WE DIDN’T LABEL IT. THIS IS WHY RELATIONSHIPS AREN’T FOR ME. I’M JUST TRYING TO HAVE A GOOD TIME.”
Okay, it’s not all like this. Sometimes…
“I’m just thinking about you. You’re smart and really cute. You’re my favorite, you really are. I enjoy talking to you. Baby, you’re the best.”
“I love talking to you too. It’s light-hearted conversation and you get my sarcasm and sense of humor but it’s also genuine. I don’t have to walk on eggshells and we can say whatever we want.”
And then, there’s…
“So what are we?”
“What do you mean?”“I mean, we’ve been talking for a while now…”“Yeah, I care about you. I’m just really busy so I’m sorry if you don’t see that sometimes.”“I get it…”“I’m not sure I want a relationship. I mean if it happens, then it will in due time. We don’t have to label it”“I just really like you.”“I like you a lot too. Want to hang out and watch Netflix tonight around 9?”
YOU+ME=?
The thing is the college years are our selfish years. We tend to want to give to the society and make time to do anything and everything we can for help with awarenesses and poverty and cancer and be in senate, be leaders, be the one who does it all and has it all but we also want to have that someone because it’s nice to have casual conversations with someone at the end of the day when you finally get home after being on campus for 11 hours because it gives us a break from the projects and campaigns that we are trying to excel in. So we do it at the expense of our feelings and emotional attachments voluntarily and involuntarily. We’ll get lunch with them and talk to them until 3 AM almost every night since August but then we’ll forget to text them on the morning of our big presentation. We’ll be too tired to send them a message after the night exam. Soon, it’s Thursday and we haven’t seen their name pop up on your phone since Sunday night. So we just let it go because we don’t have the grounds to be mad at them for not texting us. And then it becomes Friday. We hear from them. We have time to pay attention to the conversation so we talk and end up at the same parties together, hang out and talk all weekend and things are back to normal. So the little “I miss you” we felt on Thursday does not seem all that relevant anymore and disappears as you write the next “lol”. It’s Tuesday and our phones haven’t buzzed with a notification from them all day. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday, “hey, what’s up?” The “I missed talking to you” disappears again in the “so you are alive” and “yeah, I’ve just been busy”.
We lose the courage and the need to completely open up to someone because we are analytical of our life styles so we do not tell them any more than they tell us and that’s just how we’ve been. We wonder is it even worth it? It’s November and there never was a stable ground to label things or talk about boundaries and such. Finals are around the corner, evaluations at work are approaching and it’s just easier for us to let it go since “you+me=?”
It’s an epidemic. We are losing the art of young love and while some of us are lucky enough to have that real-magical-to the moon and back- young love, most of us are just in love with the idea of having a good time and having a successful future. So we just put relationships aside because we do not have the “time” or “energy” for them. “We are in love with ourselves.” That works out great for some of us and so the pattern of “you+me=?” just exists in our college years.
And then we also have our friends who want the best for us and tell us to not be distracted and to not waste our energies on people who aren’t helping us progress.