|
Featured Resources
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Falling Out of Love
High school is totally over. You’ve been accepted to college, danced your last dance at prom and walked across the stage at graduation without tripping. Congratulations, high school is over … but what if your relationship isn’t?
Every year, thousands of couples graduate from high school and head to college. Some decide to go to college together; others decide to break up before moving to different schools. And still others try to stick it out, with varying degrees of success. They made it … kinda.
Lisa Fitzgerald, 25, still talks to Curtis, her boyfriend from high school. They met their sophomore year in a class at Hazelwood West High School, in Hazelwood, MO. They started dating their junior year, and by graduation, Fitzgerald knew she didn’t want to break up. “Actually, I was a little worried that we were going to break up,” she says. “He was more like, ‘Let’s just see how it goes.’ And I was more like, ‘Let’s just stay together.’”
Fitzgerald decided to attend Maryville University in Chesterfield, Mo., and Curtis enrolled in Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville. Both lived at home, in houses about five minutes from each other, and commuted to school. Both majored in elementary education. And after dating for almost eight years, they broke up after college.
“The good thing is that we can still talk to each other,” Fitzgerald says. “I’m glad we stayed together through college. I didn’t have to worry about hooking up with people, so I could stay focused on my college career.”
Staying focused
College is about getting an education, and relationships require work that often eats up a lot of time. If you think you might be in a relationship for the wrong reasons, ask yourself, and honestly answer, some of these basic questions*: •Are we becoming emotionally distant? •Do I feel taken for granted? •Do we have similar goals? •Am I flirtatious outside of my relationship? If you suspect you might be staying together for the wrong reasons, ask yourself why you’re in your relationship.
According to Dr. Judy Kuriansky’s “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Dating,” these are typical, bad excuses for not breaking up: • “We’ve been together a long time.” • “He was my first.” • “I know I should stop going out with him — he cheats and treats me badly — but I still love him.” • “I gave her everything.”
Relationships are supposed to make you happy. While some characteristics might have been enough in high school, you might grow to want other things in college. It’s part of life that not everyone goes through the same growth process.
Growing apart
“It was the kind of thing where our parents were already planning out grandkids’ names,” Nicole Sweeney, 20, says. “It was never a doubt that we would do the whole long-distance thing.”
Sweeney met her high-school boyfriend, David, through the student newspaper during their junior year in Maple Grove, Minn. They became good friends immediately, became romantically involved later, and by the time graduation rolled around, they were sure they would stay together. “We had already been together two years — that’s a long time in high-school time,” Sweeney says.
But cracks appeared as they searched for a college. “I wanted to go to the best school that would help me pursue my goals,” she says. “He’d moved around so much as a kid that he really wanted to stay in one place.”
When Sweeney was accepted to the University of Missouri-Columbia, her boyfriend wasn’t exactly thrilled. “David was really mad at me for a while,” she says. They tried to make things work. They planned to write daily e-mails, send snail-mail letters, call every week and visit. He visited her twice second semester, but it wasn’t enough. “I began to realize that we weren’t moving in the same directions,” Sweeney says. “We had more of a gap to bridge than 600 miles.” After dating for so long, it was hard to break up. “We had the temporary break up (over winter break),” she says. “Then we got back together, and then it got to be just miserable.”
They finally split three days after Valentine’s Day, 1999, and their emotions tapered off. Now they e-mail about once a month. The breakup was hard, but Sweeney says overall that the relationship was a good experience. “I’ve realized what I want. It’s kind of a trial-and-error process.”
Figuring it all out
Relationships require work, and people have to invest time and effort into staying together. With all the adjustments students have to make to get used to college, most colleges have specific staff members to talk to freshmen about any problems they have adjusting to school.
At the University of Missouri-Columbia, freshmen can seek out peer advisers, community advisers and residence-hall directors, as well as a trained staff at the university Counseling Center. MU’s counseling center boasts walk-in counseling as well as a self-help room, where students can find pamphlets and books on problems ranging from relationship troubles to eating disorders.
Some schools, such as Boston University, even provide Web sites with links to such helpful information off their main home page. Libraries and bookstores tend to have books on relationships and dating in their self-help or psychology sections.
And if you’re looking for advice that’s a little more personal, friends or parents are always available, too. * Questions taken from “The Two Kinds of Marital Conflict,” in “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, A Practical Guide from the Country’s Foremost Relationship Expert,” by John M. Gottman, Ph.D., and Nan Silver ** Second edition Article provided by 
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
