If there’s one thing you should be proud of, it’s the skill set you acquire in college. Being a successful collegiette, you’ve mastered the balance of friends, schoolwork, activities and clubs, and you’ve even managed to find time to both feed yourself regularly and make it to the gym (sometimes). In other words, you kind of know how to do it all.
When you venture home, though, you might find that there is one thing college doesn’t teach you: what to do when you’re home for the holidays, and you get a text from the boy your seventeen-year-old self swore you’d never get over. It’s sort of a cliché, to hook up with your ex or the same guy from high school when you’re home, despite the fact that both of you don’t have all that much in common anymore.
The first thing you think when you see an old familiar name pop up on your phone may be something along the lines of complete and utter confusion (What does he want from me now?!) or maybe it makes you a little angry that he has the nerve to text you after not bothering to ask how you’ve been since the last time you two were home at the same time. But before you decide to ignore him entirely, consider rethinking…
Hooking up with your ex when you’re home from college has the potential to be an absolutely ideal situation, if you find yourself in the right circumstances. There are a lot of different scenarios you may find yourself in with a guy from high school: maybe the breakup was bad, maybe you still think you might resent him a little bit, or maybe you still haven’t really been able to find someone else you like as much since him.
Whatever the circumstances were or are, one thing is for sure: you both have different lives now. You have a whole new life at school: new friends, a new town to call your temporary home, new favorite places to eat, and even a whole bunch of new guys you have your eye on. Those things are all yours: this new life you have has nothing to do with your ex. He probably has done the same. This makes for a much more ideal situation than you probably had in high school: there is relatively no drama anymore, despite maybe some confusion from your friends as to why you two are hanging out again.
For the most part, the situation you will most likely will find yourselves in will be beautifully simple: you’ll find that since you’ve both got other lives waiting for you back at college, that the things you used to fight about are totally and completely irrelevant. All the drama has been left in the past.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that success of this type of relationship (i.e. avoiding getting hurt again or hurting him) hinges on the assumption that you both have no real expectations for this relationship other than hanging out when you’re home. More likely than not, you’ll realize you’re glad that the boy who broke your heart in high school didn’t want to stay with you through college, because you might have missed out on some of the fabulous people and experiences you’ve had since then without him.
Besides being fun, hooking up your ex again and not getting attached feels absolutely awesome. You not only feel like you’ve moved on from who you were and what you wanted at seventeen years old, but are probably also are able to remember this person fondly once you’ve realized that all the stuff that happened in high school is simply water under the bridge now.
So when you think about whether or not to respond to his effort to see you again, think about this: whatever the situation was, you’ve probably changed in some pretty significant ways since you last saw him, so there’s no harm in giving him the chance to show you he’s done the same. There’s no guarantee, but in most cases, it’s a chance worth taking.