About to leave university and aren’t sure if you and your long-term boyfriend are going to go the distance now you’re out in the big wide world? Before you freak out, just be hella glad you had that chap around for the last three years. Here’s who you could have been dating instead...
The high school sweetheart
Despite every film, older sibling warning and plain old logic, you two are different – and going to different universities isn’t going to break you up. You’ve been together nearly two years and are totally In Love. He’s in Manchester, you’re at Bournemouth, but what’s a four-hour journey at £117 when you’ve got a love like yours, eh? It’s pretty amazing how quickly that love can evaporate two weeks and eight Jaegerbombs later when that boy with the snake tattoo from your halls cracks on. Goodbye, sweet love.
Old reliable
You’ve been sleeping together longer than you spent reading War and Peace for your Russian Literature class, but this guy, be it his emotional fuckwittery or the fact that he thought Stockholm was a country, just isn’t worth getting into a real-life relationship with. However, come 3 o’clock on a Thursday morning, there’s a pretty good chance you can pick him up from outside Tasty Kebab and take him home for a drunken fumble. He’ll even stay on afterwards for a spooning session.
The older guy
This second or third-year dude has been around the block. He knows all the guys on the doors at student nights, does a weekly DJ set at the SU, is always surrounded by adoring fresher girls and for those three weeks you guys hooked up for, it felt like you were dating the most popular guy in the world. It’s only when you see through Facebook several years later that he’s still working as a promo guy for student nights at the university that you realise he might actually have been a bit sad.
The all-inclusive one
You met in freshers’ week and started dating pretty much immediately. You moved in together in your second year and even took all the same modules. It’s only towards the end of the third year when you guys break up, you realise that somewhere along the way you forgot to actually make any friends. Cue you logging on to SpareRoom.com to sign up for a £700-a-month room 20 miles away from the university, which finds you living with an odd Polish couple who’s inability to pay the electricity bill means you don’t finish your dissertation in time and wind up with a less than pleasing 2:2.
The platonic male friend
You spent two years happily getting on with this guy without even noticing his gender. Everything went a bit wrong when two of your other friends hooked up and quickly fell into one of those relationships you only see in the movies. ‘Why can't I have that?,’ you wondered with a sideways glance at your closest male friend. Two awkward weeks of hook-ups later and you both come to the conclusion that you were ‘better off friends’ before spending your final year completely avoiding each other.
Follow Jess on Twitter @jess_commons
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.