College; The land where the wild things are. Where things are usually heard about, rather than seen, and where the peak of your teenage years meet the future highlights of your adulthood. Coming into college as a born again freshman and being exposed to a foreign setting with unfamiliar faces, it's easy to get caught up in some unexpected situations; the type of situations that make a group of girls look down at you and make the boys look back twice. So if you want to make a name for yourself on campus by any means possible, Nike says "Just Do It", but this article probably isn't meant for you. But if you actually care about your reputation, and care about not being that girl or boy that people have never seen, but heard about through the grapevine then, by all means, continue.

Say this is your first day back on campus and you see this tall, built "melanin on golden" athlete or a dime-piece shawty with a rack and a certain "ass...set" that makes you "wife them up on sight" and the only thing that runs across your mind is "What is your name?" and "Do you stay in Midrise or the Suites?". Before you take that risk of eventually doing that walk of shame from the Suites to the Towers or from Charles to any other dorm and vice versa, you need to first take into consideration that at any college, it is just an upgraded version of high school; the gossip is just juicier and the drama is like "Love and Hip Hop Atlanta" meets "Bad Girls Club". Almost 200% of the time, the drama that unfolds on campus involves a player, a main chick and a side chick (or chicks). I can speak from experience that almost 90% of the time nobody knows which title is theirs. This, my friend, is what you call a "Situation-ship".

Situation-ship Starter Pack:

1. "I don't want anything serious"

2. "We can have Sex though"

3. "You know you're the only one for me"

4. "I still don't want a relationship right now though"

5. "Don't talk to anyone else"

6. "We're friends, right? Because that's all I need right now"

7. "We don't need a title. I got you and you got me."

8. "Let's lay low for a while, I don't like people knowing my business"

If you ever find yourself talking to someone you like and have to always question yourself "What are we?" or "What are we doing?", then 10 times out of 10 what you are doing is wasting your time. If that special someone is not trying to spell out to you that they want to build a relationship with you, then I send you my most sincere regards. They're just not that into you. Shoot, they might not even be sure about what they want and both of these options never end well. If you find yourself falling victim to being in a situation-ship gone wrong, don't let that have a long term effect on you. The sad truth is that just like you, they are here for an education and you probably were just something to pass time. People tend to struggle with this fact because they end up catching feelings far too fast and hard. The main reason for this being that too many college kids are already struggling with being alone and the first chance they get of actually having a companion, they rush the entire relationship. Our urban culture has even taken the meaning out of the word bae, which is actually an acronym meaning "Before All Else". I don't know about you, but I wouldn't put a guy I'm not even sure I'm going to be with tomorrow before everything else, especially my education . Within two days of talking to someone, if you start using the term bae , maybe you need to stay single for a while...

Any type of relationship you have in life will definitely come with its issues. It's up to you to decide whether you think it is worth it to add those issues to the heavy load that you already have in college. Dealing with another person always comes with pros and cons. Pros such as having someone to talk to late at night, there to support you at your games or events and even just someone to "Study and Chill" with. But if you look at the cons, there will be disagreements, possibly a third-party person or even a nasty breakup earning you a feature on an NSU Confession page. In order to avoid being stuck in a sticky situation-ship, you have to remember why you came to college in the first place. This does not apply to the people that came to college hoping to have a "Flavor of Love" semester. For everybody else, supposedly you came to college to further your educational path in hopes of getting a job in order to be successful. All you have to do is stay on your grind. When you do, someone who is also on their grind will come along to help build alongside yours. Rather than looking for a "bae", focus on you by bettering yourself and eventually your King or Queen will soon come with it. But for now.. continue to Slay.