After graduating high school, many couples start to handle the reality of going long distance during college. Fortunately for me, my boyfriend and I had the perfect opportunity to go to the same university. Many friends and family members warned us not to go to school together. They wanted us to avoid pressuring each other into a university we didn’t fully appreciate. Bradley just so happened to be both our first choices without even realizing it. Honestly, it was the school we both loved as individuals, it has exactly what we were looking for from the curriculum to the surrounding areas and the way people treat us as students and as humans. This is not to say you need to or should go to college with your significant other, this is simply our experience and what helps us in school as a couple.
From the very beginning we just talked endlessly about our opinion on things like friend groups, Greek Life, eating, and everything in between. We had done this before actually deciding on the same college just to make sure we know this is where we want to be as a couple. Some things have gone the way we expected and some things haven’t, we knew this would happen. It’s all just a matter of adapting to things as they come to us. He has taught me over the years that I can’t force things to go the way I want. I can’t always expect the whole university to go according to my plan just because I say so. He has kept me grounded and made sure I look at things realistically. One thing that hasn’t gone exactly according to plan is our friend groups. We had agreed if we had separate friend groups we wouldn’t hold each other back, of course. We understand the importance of having your own personal time with our own friends. However, after getting to school and looking at the people, a month into school we had the same friend group from his dorm building. Sure, sometimes the group will split up and the guys will go to the store while the girls sit and gossip, but the group as a whole remains the same. My roommate is also here with her boyfriend. So, occasionally we go out to dinner together or a double sleepover at our dorm. The four of us have another little group of friends, but there are times my roommate and I hangout without the boys.
Another thing we addressed before coming to school is the importance of independent time. This goes hand-in-hand with communication and the understanding that we have two very different majors. He is a bio-med and pre-med major, and I am a criminology major working on sociology and anthropology minors. His course load is way different than mine, which means he spends more time in office hours and study sessions than I probably ever will. For us, personal time looks different. Sometimes I just need to lay down and scroll on TikTok for an hour, sometimes I need to take an “everything” shower and deep clean my dorm. For him, he goes to the gym, or maybe he goes to get food with his friends. But at the end of the day, we each make a point to communicate how we feel and what we need from one another.
Along with personal time, it’s also important for us to do more romantic and “couple-y” things too. Yes, we see each other a million times a day, but eating dinner with our friends, and then sleeping next to one another doesn’t exactly count as quality time. We still go out to dinner together and on coffee runs. Sometimes it helps us decompress by enjoying lunch together — just the two of us. We even make it cheesy sometimes and “formally” ask each other out, hoping we don’t jokingly get rejected. Little things like that help to reestablish our commitment to each other as a couple.
Of course I need to stress the importance of mental health. I have struggled with anxiety my whole life, coming to college is throwing my anxiety through the roof. Everything I already talked about, plus a million other things, will impact your mental health. I am not a mental health professional, but some things that have helped me are planners and lists. I like feeling in control of everything and when I feel out of control, I plan and list everything I need to and account for time to decompress, see him, my friends or do nothing at all. Communication will play into this, college will impact everyone and possibly cause issues you have never dealt with before. This is 100% normal, experiment and find what helps you most as an individual and as a couple.
Realistically, not everyone will go to college with their significant other. If you are, communicate and take care of yourself, everyone deals with things differently, but this is the list of what has helped my boyfriend and I.