I sat down and talked to four different ladies in four completely different types of relationships. Just by reading their stories, you can get a feel for the different styles of relationships out there, as well as what you might identify with. As for all of the single readers like myself, feel free to live vicariously through these women, or just be happy you’re single.
Sandro and Melissa: Long Term
1. How did you guys meet?
“We met through a mutual friend in high school. Danny, a kid I went to high school with, told Sandro about me. He told him he wouldn’t be able to hook up with me. But Sandro said he bet he could, so we started talking on Facebook [he went to private school, I went to public school]. We met in person at the Country Center (a place where basketball games are played) and talked for a little, but then left. We didn’t really talk until about a year later. We started talking again during the winter and it was just really random. We’ve been dating for 4 years and 3 months now”.
2. What makes you two work well together?
“We have similar interests, the fact that he plays basketball and I was always into sports. Personality wise, we’re total opposites so its almost like opposites attract. He’s more of the talkative one and I like to observe and sit back. The fact that he’s motivated helps me want to be motivated too. He wants to go to law school, all that stuff”.
3. Ever feel like you had to slow things down?
“Not for me, or for him either. The topic of marriage and all that stuff got brought up, but it almost seemed like it was going to happen. We didn’t want to slow it down because it just seemed right, I guess”.
4. Has your relationship ever negatively affected your friendships?
“All of my friends from when I was younger…one of my best friends, I lost my friendship with her, which ended my other friendships with that whole group because they thought I was with him too much. But his guy friends, they were good about it. They liked that we were together. But that didn’t really affect me; I made friends who were better than those girls. They were definitely jealous”.
5. Biggest fight?
“We were at the beach, and we were going for a run. I was really out of shape so I wasn’t in the mood to run, but I went anyways. So we started running and I wanted to stop, because I felt gross and out of shape. He decided to wait for me, and I got mad that he waited for me. We got into this big fight because I was being an idiot and didn’t want him to keep waiting for me. I totally ignored him for the rest of the day at the beach, so he ended up leaving with his mom. That was the biggest fight”.
Zach and Chelsey: Best Friends
1. How did you guys meet?
“We met beginning of freshman year, and we’ve been dating a year now. We met through Sophie, one of my best girl friends and his good friend from home. At first we hooked up first semester, but that was all he wanted. I hated it and told him I couldn’t do it and that he had to leave. I just wasn’t into it. But then, we hung out a lot and became best friends through Sophie. We started to text, and we would text all the time, and then I would catch myself thinking about him, and I started thinking, ‘Hmm, maybe this could work again…’ So then we tried it again, and it was good and it’s been good since”.
2. What makes this relationship different from past relationships?
“This is the first guy I’ve ever loved. I’ve never felt so comfortable with someone. He’s everything in one. He’s my best friend; he does everything with me. He eats with me, he goes to the gym with me, he studies with me, he hangs with me. But then he’s also there to give me the TLC that I need. We’re away from home—we don’t have our families—so he’s like my safe haven. Nothing has lasted this long. He is Jewish [like me], so we share something more than I have with any of my past relationships. I’ve never felt like I was so special to someone. I’ve never felt like someone needed me”.
3. Have fights with mutual friends ever gotten in the way of your relationship?
“No. He’s always honest with me: if he thinks I’m being unreasonable, than I’m being unreasonable and he’ll tell me. There are a fair amount of times when he will agree with me if I get into a fight with one of our friends, but he’s not immature. So he doesn’t ignore them or anything, because that’s not his battle. And I don’t expect him to. He’ll definitely talk it out with me regardless of who it is and his relationship with them”.
4. Do you ever feel like you need more alone time, apart from your friends?
“No. We definitely still have our time away from each other, because we live in different buildings. Our groups of friends have also kind of evolved a lot more this year. He has a lot more guy friends in his building that I’m still friendly with, but he’ll hang with them without me. And I have a lot more girl friends that he’s not necessarily as close with as he is with my good girl friends. It’s definitely a good mix of time with him and time without him. Even when we’re together with all of our friends, that’s good, but I definitely need some time with just him and me. School also conflicts with studying and stuff. He always has his tests a different week than I have my tests, so school probably gets in the way more than friends do”.
5. Biggest fight?
“We do argue a lot about the studying thing. I want to get my work done during the day; he wants to get his work done at night. So he’ll mess around all day while I’m studying. And when I want to chill at night, he wants to study. We definitely argue so much about that because I can’t say anything without me sounding controlling and crazy. But I get so upset that he doesn’t take that into consideration”.
Joe and Tessa: Long Distance
1. How did you guys meet?
“We met freshman year of high school at a movie. We were with all of our friends and I heard that he liked me, so we sat next to each other and talked for a little bit. Then he texted me, but this was freshman year so it was all weird, really stupid. So we dated freshman year, but I broke up with him after about 4 or 5 months. I was so young and had no idea, I just felt like I didn’t care about him. Sophomore year we dated other people, and he really hated me and didn’t talk to me at all. Junior year, we started talking again because we were in the same gym class. One day during study we went out to his car, and he was telling me about all of his problems with his girlfriend and I was giving him advice and stuff. It was weird because we hadn’t talked in so long. I was kind of like, ‘Ah, I like you again!’ We talked consistently and hung out, even though I was still with my boyfriend. But then I broke up with him, because I liked Joe again. Beginning of junior year was when we got back together, and we’ve been together ever since”.
2. What made your relationship worth keeping?
“We had broken up end of senior year, because he didn’t want to date. So I thought, ‘Fine, it’s his loss’. I went to school first, and he went a week later. It was a month before we got back together, and he was the one who thought he had made a huge mistake. I had already hooked up with three other people, but he hadn’t, and didn’t know that I had. He told me he didn’t want anyone at his school, and every single night that he went out he would call me. After I told him I hooked up with other people, he wanted to make it even and hooked up with three people himself. The main reason we didn’t date in college was so that we could hook up with other people. We wanted to end on a good note rather than going to college and ending on a really bad note. So he randomly hooked up with three people at a concert one night, but he was talking to me the whole time telling me he didn’t like it. I pretty much had relationships all throughout high school, so I never really had the chance to be single. I came here and got it all out of my system, but I didn’t really like it. He’s not that far away, only 3 hours. He plays lacrosse there and is in season, so that makes it a little hard. But it makes seeing each other that much more worth it”.
3. What has been the hardest part?
“Not being there with each other, physically. He goes to Hamilton, so he has so much work, and also plays lacrosse so we don’t talk that much during the week. Practice takes out five hours during his day that we just don’t talk. So that makes it tough. Also, going out at night and the whole social scene sucks. Because you’re like, ‘Aw, I wish you could be here’. We vid chat at night sometimes, which is nice, but it just sucks”.
4. How has it changed you, and how has it changed your relationship?
“It hasn’t really changed me that much. I’m still the same person; I’m just not going out and being crazy. I wouldn’t really anyways. I just kind of do my own thing out at parties when everyone is dancing with each other. My close friends here would never even try and jeopardize that. They know I’ve been in a relationship for a while, so I don’t have to be on my toes or anything, because I’m not really worried about that. As far as the relationship, it has made it a lot stronger. I have to trust him 100%; he has to trust me 100%— which we do. You really have to emphasize that. Freshman guys all want to go out, but he’s not like that at all. His school is so different, it’s really tiny and the nightlife here is much bigger. I appreciate him so much more now. We’re not at home, so I can’t see him everyday and hang out and go get food or anything. So you appreciate having him so much more”.
5. Biggest fight?
“There are tons of mini ones after the weekend. You get skeptical, because you’re like, ‘well you didn’t talk to me at all last night’. No big ones really, just a lot of small things. Like, ‘Who is that girl on Facebook, why didn’t you tell me that?’ Jealousy is the biggest part of long distance fighting-wise. He hasn’t met all of my guy friends. He doesn’t really hang out with that many girls I guess, but I haven’t met all of them. The whole jealousy factor…you just feel like they’re your property since we’ve been together for so long”.
Jack and Gabbie: Open
1. How did you guys meet?
“We met in middle school when I was in 8th grade and he was in 7th grade. We met through a mutual friend/the middle school play. We had a young relationship for about a year and then we broke up halfway through my freshman year. A few years later, we picked things up again and now we’ve been dating for 9 months. In the time that we weren’t dating, we were never really apart from each other. Even if we’d go through periods of not talking, we always cared about each other”.
2. What makes you, as an individual, good for an open relationship?
“For me personally, it’s less about what makes me a good person for an open relationship and more about what makes me a bad person for a closed one. The most important and influencing part of this is that the boyfriend I dated before this for three and a half years was really controlling. Especially towards the end of our relationship, he really held breaking up with me over my head and would get me to do things or change my ways by threatening to leave me. It was really hard to be in that kind of relationship and it left a lot of scars. I really do want to be in a closed relationship one day, but being slightly more open gives me more room to breathe and figure things out with myself a little bit. I don’t have to constantly worry about messing things up or losing my boyfriend. Also, being in an open relationship has taught me a lot about myself. To be honest, even when I would do things with another guy, it was never like I expected it to be. I ended up regretting it and finding myself not thinking about other people as much. For some reason, being in an open relationship has actually helped me realize what being faithful means and how to balance that in my life. Also, a closed relationship is really hard since I’m at college and he’s still in high school. Neither of us knows exactly what’s going on in each other’s lives and that can be scary sometimes. But being in an open relationship, neither of us have any reason to lie. There’s no cheating. And if anything were to happen, I’d tell him and he’d tell me. Usually, you lie when you’re dating someone because you don’t want him or her to break up with you. When you’re in an open relationship, you can be honest with each other. When I say ‘I’m not attracted to that guy’ or ‘nothing happened’ he knows I mean it, because being in an open relationship means for us means I would tell him if I did and he asked. I really do love my boyfriend and in the long run he’s the only one I want to be with, but being open just makes things a little clearer. There aren’t any of those Was-That-Cheating-Or-Not moments. You just go by how you feel”.
3. How was the decision made to be open?
“I had just gotten out of dating my extremely controlling ex-boyfriend for 3 1/2 years. I knew that I needed a break of some sort and that it wouldn’t be healthy for me to dive back into what I knew would be a long term relationship. But, I knew how I felt and I knew being without my boyfriend would be miserable. So I thought an open relationship that we could change to closed when I was ready would be a good start. My boyfriend was really understanding: he saw first hand the kind of mental abusive my ex-boyfriend put me through and he understood the space I needed, especially since I was about to go to college. At the same time, it was a tricky transition”.
4. What has been the hardest part?
“The hardest part was definitely the first time I hooked up with someone else. For me, it was scary. I felt like I was doing something wrong even though I knew we had said it was okay. When my boyfriend and I talked about it, it was really hard and uncomfortable. I could tell it really hurt him that it all happened so fast. We had to work through a system of figuring out how much he wanted to know and how far we could go. We agreed sex was off-limits. The more time that went by, the more we restricted our terms of what an open relationship was. This was totally mutual: the longer I was in one, the more I wanted to be with just him. This was actually reassuring. Although it was hard to understand everything–and hard to explain to him why I wanted one–it actually really strengthened the trust we have for each other”.
5. Biggest fight?
“The biggest fight we’ve gotten in was actually nothing to do with being in an open relationship. Our biggest fight was actually because we misunderstood each other in a fight that escalated it. The biggest fight we ever had that had to do with being in an open relationship, however, started because he heard about something I had done from an outside source and not from me. This was back when our terms for being in an open relationship weren’t exactly defined. I thought the don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy was in effect, while he was under the impression that we were supposed to tell each other everything, even if it hurt. Once that initial shock was overcome, we were able to move on. We defined clearer rules (tell each other when there’s a new person involved, but leaves out details) that smoothed over any other possible fights. In the end, it actually has been a really positive experience. I think open relationships can be a really good thing, but it has to be with the right person and for the right reasons”.