College is an opportunity for exploration, experimentation, and sometimes even self-discovery. Exploring your romantic interests, if done correctly, can be a fun and safe way to understand more about yourself and what you look for in others. Fortunately, we have devised a fun and safe way to explore romantic companionship potential in our peers. This method of searching for compatible partners is called “dating”. While in college, you may be living a complex social, educational, and family life. To introduce dating into the complex life you are already living only makes things more complicated, especially when inevitably dating bleeds over into other aspects of your life. That is why, without interjecting my opinions into anyone’s romantic habits, I have listed the potential consequences of publicizing your relationship in your social, educational, and family life.
- If you have them, you probably enjoy the time spent with your friends. If you also enjoy time spent with your romantic partner, it may seem like a good idea to blend the two. A positive outcome could be that they have good platonic chemistry. If this occurs you can then enjoy both your social life and dating life at the same time. However, they could have too much chemistry or too little. Depending on how much you trust your friends, they may also be a good judge of the character of your date.
- Since you are dating in college, your relationship may intrude into your educational life. Observant individuals may gain awareness of your current dating status, but if not, your dating life can remain invisible in your educational life. This is good because privacy is important and very sexy. Neither your classmates nor your professor needs to know your romantic relationships. The greatest potential consequence of intermingling your dating and educational lives is that you become distracted and get off track from everything you ever worked and looked forward to.
- Your family, or whomever you choose to call your family, maybe the most permanent part of your life. Like your friends, your family probably knows you well and can be a good judge of character, however, introducing another part of your life to your family life could be a sign of permanence both for your family and your partner. Varying levels of confidence are required when introducing different parts of your life to each other, but since your family life is in most cases more permanent than other parts, confidence in introductions to your family life is very important.
Publicizing your relationship is a critical romantic milestone. You must have confidence in what you are doing and be aware of the consequences. Otherwise, you could have a secret relationship forever, isolating yourself from society with only your partner. This could result in the most passionate and powerful relationship that only you know and choose not to share with the rest of the world, or it could result in dependence on your partner and regret that you gave up every other part of your life in full dedication of someone you realize doesn’t satisfy you. Dating is complicated.