By Erich Gillespie (Whetstone staff)
Erich Gillespie       Melissa Boyd / Whetstone
Every once in a while you’ll hear the story of some ancient couple who first met in college and are now inseparable and belong in either a Lifetime movie special or an assisted living community. The rest of the college stories consist of messy break-ups and failed monogamy, one reason I haven’t had a girlfriend since the Bush administration.
We take each other too seriously. A lot of people rush into relationships for a variety of bad reasons. When we will look back on this point in our lives, we’ll realize that we didn’t know anything. We’ll also realize that only a small percent of these romantic connections we make will turn out to be Lifetime movie specials.
Nearly half of first marriages end in divorce within the first 15 years. Interesting.
How do so many people get it wrong? My guess is people my age start to worry that they may never find the right person – that they may be alone forever. Others just can’t wait to hop into this sex thing everyone keeps talking about.
A CNN report on marriage dissolution in the U.S. said, “Researchers claim the older a woman was when she first married, the longer the marriage was likely to last.â€Â Interesting.
A sexually-active college man is a stud, while sexually-active college women are degraded. This gender contradiction is driving a wedge between healthy, mature relationships because of the pressure it puts on single women.
A UWeekly (the official paper of Ohio State University) article reported, “The thing that many college students are looking forward to after graduation is marriage. Yes, you read correctly. Marriage. In fact, many graduates are jumping on the chance to marry their college sweethearts.†Interesting.
After graduation, we are free to travel the world and enter into our post-graduate years with nothing to hold us down. But apparently, marriage is on the minds of many college students. I do not know why people subject themselves to a standardized life with standardized problems, complemented by a standardized relationship in which they raise standardized families to follow in their completely standardized footsteps. It must be all of these standardized tests.
The mistakes we make in college we will be sure to avoid 20 years from now when we are raising a family. But right now, it should prove impossible to fall in love with someone else, because we should be too busy falling in love with ourselves.
