Going to School With Your Boyfriend

juillet
Mon, 21 Apr 2014 04:37:54 +0000

I went to college with my boyfriend. He was a year older than me, and already at the college. I wanted to go to the college for different reasons, but him being there was a plus, and so I went. (It was slightly different in that my boyfriend went to a men’s college in my consortium and I went to the women’s, but given that the colleges’ campuses were coterminous it was basically like going to the same college. Think of it like you going to Scripps and your boyfriend going to Pomona or Pitzer.)

I definitely had the problem where I spent too much time with him. This wasn’t so much an issue my freshman year - we both had robust social lives separately and together, and although I spent a lot of time with him I also made a lot of friends. But we started to have issues and bhe began to go through things that I desperately wanted to help him with, and so I withdrew from my own social scene a bit. I had had plans to get super involved on campus and I did not, mostly because of my relationship. As a result, I don’t really have a ton of close friends from college - some friends, for sure, but not the best college buddies I had planned to make. So this is definitely something that can happen if you are not careful - even if you are a super gregarious person like I am.

We did break up in my junior year (and got back together…we’re married now) but that wasn’t awkward. Our consortium campus had about 8,000 students on it; at the time he lived off-campus, and I never saw him unless we pre-arranged it. We were also in different majors and so our classes never had a chance to overlap. I will say that he made me feel super guilty about studying abroad, but I ended up doing it anyway.

I think if I could do it all over again, I’d rather have not gone to college anywhere near my high school boyfriend. Obviously we got married in the end and if we weren’t near each other, perhaps that wouldn’t have happened. But I think college is a time for exploration of new things, and if you’re emotionally tied to a person you brought in from HS - seriously tied - then you can inadvertently stunt your own growth without realizing it.

At the same time, though, I wouldn’t let him scare you away from choosing your top choice. The college I attended was my first choice and also gave me a very large scholarship, so I wasn’t going to let my bf stop me - and like I said, I still had a great time, I just wasn’t as involved as I really wanted to be in formal campus activities because I was spending too much time with him. But if you are mature enough to realize that can be a problem right now, perhaps you won’t fall prey to the same issue. You just need to set those boundaries ahead of time and set a plan for the things you really want to do. Write them down, even, and check in on your progress every semester or so. Are you involved in the campus activities you wanted to do, and if not, why not? Once you get some close friends, they can also be a barometer - your close girlfriends will often tell you if you are spending too much time with your boyfriend.