Have you ever wondered what it’s like to date someone who goes to the school that constantly ties yours as the #1 public school in the nation? Or what it’s like dating someone who goes to a school with a better acronym than yours? Well, luckily I have first-hand experience, and can confidently say it’s nothing like Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, except for the opposite worlds part of the play.
In Feb. 2024, my now boyfriend and I started talking exclusively and eventually began dating mid-summer. Before we dated, we were long-time friends from the same city, Los Angeles, California. So, when I came back to LA after my first year of school ended, we spent almost all of July and August together, just enjoying each other’s company. However, we failed to realize that when I had to go back to school for the Fall semester, we’d be 300 miles apart. This also meant that we didn’t think about how we’d be going to rival UC schools.
I didn’t process it until someone blocked me on Instagram after I told them my boyfriend goes to UCLA and studies engineering for fun!
The fact of the matter though, is that it’s really “silly-fun” dating someone on the other side of the state. In terms of our studies, it helps that we both major in intense subjects at competitive schools because we both have a mutual understanding that we live in the trenches (the library) 24/7. Even our midterms are somehow in the same weeks as each other. And unlike most couples, we get to joke about the assumptions that come from long-distance dating, rival-school-dating, Wattpad-dating, etc. At the end of the day, it’s always refreshing to see each other genuinely happy at our respective schools, even if that means being 300 miles apart for months on end.
Now to answer the question on everyone’s minds, yes, he did call me when UCLA surpassed UC Berkeley in the U.S. News 2025 Public School Rankings. And yes, he did brag about how I basically go to community college, while he attends Harvard (neither one of us even applied to Harvard). These are the only downsides to dating someone at a rival school, but here’s to hoping UC Berkeley dethrones UCLA in next year’s rankings!
I want to address the comments now. No, we’re not Romeo & Juliet; it’s a tragedy play for a reason. Neither one of us is dead or died for the other. The only real correlation is that we live different lives, in that, if I walk around campus I have a sweater on while he’s sweating like there’s no tomorrow in Los Angeles. I will admit that I do frequently ask him if he’d drink poison for me, and every time without a skip of a beat, he calls me a psycho!
Dating someone on the opposite side of the state has its ups and downs. I can always count on him to Facetime or call me when I leave the library at night, so I’m not scared. At the same time, I also cry about how we won’t see each other for months on end. But in the end, he’s undeniably cooler than everyone at UC Berkeley (and I secretly hope I’m cooler than any person he’ll ever meet in LA). We’re not Romeo or Juliet, but we are a bruin and a bear, who just so happened to find and enjoy each other’s company. Plus, we get an ego boost every time we say our significant partner is actually really smart.