Even though you are totally convinced otherwise, one day a person may take that brave leap and marry you. They may get down on one knee and see a beautiful put-together woman in front of them. To this future person of your dreams, you will appear to be the most confident and radiant lady full of class and charisma. But that’s not who you always were. Right now you’re probably living in an apartment that’s mostly decorated by half-full cups that you were too lazy to put in the dishwasher. Your weekends might consist of mental breakdowns in between Netflix binges. And you have probably cried over a guy you’ve only met once at least one time this year. Who has been there to laugh and cry with you through it all? Your college friends. So, to the person who may take up my future, you might have my heart one day but you’ll never have my past.
The freshman 15
Your future love will see that you always keep vegetables and fruits stocked in the house. He or she will notice that you opt for a salad at meals sometimes instead of a steak. But rewind to your present college years, and there you are ordering pokey sticks on Thursday nights to get a good deal on the “extreme” size. Yet, your friends still encourage you to buy that revealing shirt and swear that you look better with your new curves anyway.
Your heartbreaks
Your future bae most likely won’t ever see you go through these or inflict these upon you, but your college friends saw your first young-adult relationships grow, blossom and then die. Your friends right now are the ones who saw you during your first freshman summer when you couldn’t even keep count of the hookups’ numbers you got, and you swore that one of them texting you at 1 a.m. was a sign of true love. But throughout the college years, you learned the hard way that just because your significant other texts you all day doesn’t mean you are the only one in their life. You wallowed in the corner of the bar when you saw him with his new girlfriend, and your friends were there to make sure your running mascara was fixed just in case he saw you.
Your first failures
In your future, you will probably see your life pave out in many directions, and not everything you want will come to you. You’ll get a promotion. You’ll get laid off. You will work hard for a raise, and you may not make the cut. Your future person will see these trials, but they will not see the raw emotion that took you off guard when you first experienced these failures as an adult, like when you received your first F on an exam even though you studied for two weeks straight. Your life partner will never see your face when you first realized that not every organization you apply to will accept you, and that not every internship that interviews you hires you. These disappointments are hard to deal with, especially when you have never experienced them before, but luckily your friends were there to put on fuzzy pants with you, accept that you won’t change the world (at least not yet) and that failure is painful but essential to success. And let’s be real — a lot of growth in a young person’s life takes place with a bottle of wine and a group of close friends.
Your evolution from girl to woman
As girls, we are still trying to figure out who we are in this world and how we make our lives the best that they can be. We become women only when we realize that the way to make our lives the best they can be is to create happiness in all that we do. And on this journey, evidently, is how we ended up with a person to spend the rest of our lives with. But our friends are the ones who lifted us high when we were feeling too low to believe in ourselves. They are the ones who made us get our lazy butts out of bed on Saturday because everyone knows studying sucks, but it sucks a lot less with good company. Our friends pushed us to turn our petty thoughts into productive ones. They watched us trade in our mini skirt for a business professional one, and they watched our nights out at the bars turn into nights in bed early.
Your future may hold a person who one day may be able to identify your favorite outfit to wear out to dinners, your favorite throw pillow in the house and your favorite romantic comedy to watch when you’ve had a rough day. But it is your college friends who will never forget your favorite fraternity that you spent way too many nights with when you should have been studying, which is actually why you ended up dropping your initial difficult major for one you enjoyed more.
Your college friends know that you are perfectly content with a $7 bottle of pink Moscato and that anything more expensive than that is just wasteful. Your college friends play a crucial role in your most vital years of early adulthood. Without them you might have actually never made it home from that club in Orlando, you might have dropped out when you realized how hard it really was to get good grades, and you may have never had the confidence boost you needed to finally date someone seriously and settle down. But future significant other, don’t feel too left out. We’ll make sure to fill you in on all of the good stories from back in our college days.
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