The Reality of Coming to College With a Boyfriend

It's basic universal knowledge that going to College with a boyfriend is a giant "Don't." It's also as if it's written in bright, bold red with all caps, and underlined too for good measure. The summer before my freshman year at college, everyone told me that it was a bad idea to have a boyfriend coming into college. My mother always told me that I would grow so much in my first year and having a boyfriend would limit the experiences I should have. I knew all of this going into it my freshman year and I still believed that my relationship was the exception.

The problems that college introduced into my relationship weren't problems that happened overnight. Everyone grows and changes in the first few months of college and my relationship wasn't immune to that. I started becoming more outgoing and was always looking to try something new while he became more introverted and quiet. We slowly started arguing about me going out with my new friends all the time and him always wanting to stay in. These arguments soon morphed into full-blown fights about how I had changed all of a sudden and how he never made an effort anymore.

Those few months of none stop fighting were the most toxic of my entire life. Anything that either one of us did would piss the other off. The amount of judgment and pettiness that went on was horrifying. It was beyond difficult to see how our once beautiful, happy relationship had transformed into something so messy and full of hate. Now, I'm not saying that going to college was the cause of all of my relationship problems, but it was definitely the catalyst to most of them. With all of the added stress from school work and anxiety that came with going to college, things went sour fast.

Take my advice, listen to your family, friends, and everyone who tells you that coming to college in a relationship is a terrible idea. College changes people and most of the time, those changes will definitely affect any relationship. Everyone grows and matures in different ways and it's unfair to expect your significant other to mature the same way you are. The added stress and anxiety of the first year of college is already tough to deal with even without the pressure of a relationship. Looking back at the first semester at college, I wish I had taken