Lately, I have been hearing a lot of people saying, “take it slow,” or “don’t you think that you’re going a little too fast” and it got me thinking. Why do so many people want relationships to happen slowly? Is there still a need to have relationships progress slowly, or can they pick up the pace like everything else has over the past few decades? I say that if you’re ready for a relationship, you should dive in head first and be proactive about getting everything moving along.
1. It’s easy to make time.
This doesn’t mean that you should go around sleeping with everyone you meet, I will always be an advocate of safe and healthy relationships, but most people are only in college for four years. During this time you should be focusing on your studies, but you also need to be able to have a life. Having a life consists of having fun with friends, going to sporting events, going to special events your college hosts, going to parties and being able to go out with a significant other. Taking 20 minutes out of your day to talk to people on the phone should be encouraged so that teenagers, and young twenty somethings can still feel connected. Now that everyone has a cellphone, it is easy to choose times to meet up or text if you really are too busy to see your sweetie that day. You can put down the Candy Crush, or whatever game is your addiction of choice, and call up that special someone.2. You’re only in college for so long.
As I mentioned before, most people are only in college for four years. Sure, there’s grad school, but a lot of people work through grad school so that doesn’t really apply here. If you started college at 18, you’re already 22 by the time you graduate. That may not seem like a big deal, but some of our parents had two or more kids in that span of time! “Taking it slowly” can take a long time, but when you get down to it, you don’t really have that time to be wasting. If you want to meet someone you’ll be in a long-term relationship with, maybe even possibly marry down the road, then you shouldn’t spend your time on a person who doesn’t want the relationship to progress. Time is a-wastin’, so going into a relationship quickly could just save you from wasting two years of your life on someone who only wanted to be casual. You could have spent some of that time with another person who was more interested in the type of relationship you were looking for.3. Some people aren’t worth your time.
Think about it. Do you want to spend three months with a person only to find out that they don’t want to have kids? Or maybe they want a huge family, but you don’t see that for yourself. So now what do you do? You just spent three months with this person and then break up because of a trait that you waited so long to find out about. Moving into a relationship quickly doesn’t mean sleeping together on the first date, it just means that you are proactive about getting to know each other. One of the greatest things about living on campus in college is that you and your significant other have more than enough opportunities to see each other. You can get lunch or dinner, study together, or just hang out in the dorms. So if you have all of these opportunities, use them! If the person you’re seeing isn’t for you, call it off. You might only spend two or three weeks getting to know the important details rather than needing months to figure it all out.4. Fast is a relative term.
How quickly does a “fast-moving relationship” really progress? Our generation considers kissing on the first date or saying those three special words within a month to be fast. It’s all relative. So if you are seeing the person you like day in and day out, saying “I love you” in a month really isn’t all that fast. You can learn a lot about a person in 30 days. Again, because you have so many opportunities to see each other throughout the day in college, you’re not moving at a pace that is much faster than normal anyway.5. As long as you’re comfortable it doesn’t matter.
Maybe you’re the kind of person who needs to go on a few dates before you feel comfortable making things official. Maybe you’re the kind of person who is comfortable kissing on the first date. Maybe you’re a mixture and just go with the flow of whoever you’re with. These are all reasonable possibilities for young people, and they are all choices. So if you want to kiss on the first date, that’s cool. If not, that’s okay too. It all just depends on what feels comfortable to you and the person you’re going out with. It’s your relationship and you should feel comfortable taking it the pace you deem necessary. Now if your partner's pace is slower than yours you should respect that, and vice versa, but that is a decision for you and your partner. Not your mom, sibling, friend, or cashier at the supermarket down the street.6. Taking it fast means you get more time together.
Say you’re one of those people who is determined to find your life partner while you are in college. If you meet the right person, do you want to look back and think, “I wish we had taken more time for each other from the start,”? If you meet the person that you will one day marry, wouldn’t you want to spend as much time together as possible? Taking the relationship quickly can be beneficial for this because you could realize sooner how much you mean to one another and build on that to have a longer, happier relationship. No matter what speed you take your relationship, you’re going to find out the important characteristics and aspects of that person eventually, so why not start early? Asking someone if they ever see themselves having kids isn’t as strange as it might sound. And them answering that they don’t know or aren’t sure is a perfectly acceptable answer. Personally, I never know what I want to have for dinner but know that I want to have kids in the future. Others know what dinner is going to be for the next day but haven’t thought too much about their more distant future. Both are okay, and hey, now the thought is in their head so they might be able to give you an answer after they think about it more.Rihanna said, "You don't want to live your life and then meet someone. You want to share your life with someone. That's what I'm missing right now." Going quickly isn't bad when you're in college, it could actually be beneficial to help get your life started. And always remember, as long as you're comfortable with how your relationship is progressing, that's all that really matters.
