We all want to be loved by someone else, but sometimes love isn’t what we need.
Love is constantly being thrown in our faces, whether it’s cuffing season in the winter, relationship posts on Facebook, Valentine’s Day or reality TV shows like “Are You the One?” With all this love around us, the pressure to find someone to share memories with is amplified.
Aside from society showing us throughout the media that love is essential if you want to be happy, there’s even more pressure to find ‘the one’ on a college campus. Practically everyone is dating, talking to or hooking up with at least one person. It makes sense for students to want and seek out companionship at their university or college. When students aren’t busy doing their homework, working out or attending meetings it’s nice to have someone special to spend your free time with.
I came to college under the pretense that these would be the best four years of my life and full of girl friend adventure. But boy was I wrong about the adventure part! Instead of taking road trips with my girl friends and traveling to exotic places over spring break, all they wanted to do was go on double dates and venture around the local Richmond area. The pressure was on for me to find someone to share these experiences with. There was no way I wanted to be the only friend on these outings without some arm candy beside her.
I, regrettably, made it my mission to find love just to say I had found it. So with my best foot forward I set out on my quest for love, but I didn’t exactly know what love looked like or even where to begin. I had so many questions, and not a single friend majoring in ‘love’ to answer them. I wasn’t entirely sure where I was supposed to find him at, what he should look like, sound like or act like. This meant most of the guys I found myself getting involved with were losers. Their attention spans were equivalent to that of a baby squirrel, and the conversation topics ranged from talking about how hammered he and his boys got the night before, to how he couldn’t find his favorite test pencil before his first Energy! exam. These conversations were dull and didn’t stimulate me in any way, but still I stuck around and wasted both of our time. It’s sad to say, but most of these guys were time fillers for me. They gave me something to do when none of my friends wanted to do anything.
I really should have focused my attention on getting good grades and graduating with a degree. College is a place filled with young, hopeless romantics, and it’s easy to get to caught up in wanting something someone else has. More often the not, when you search for love due to pressure or loneliness, you end up forcing connections with people you just aren’t meant to be with. That’s what happened in my case. I was forcing myself to like guys I simply wasn’t into, at all. It’s easy to get into a funk when you think everyone else around you has found his or her perfect match, and you have to soon or you never will.
A relationship can be time consuming, emotionally draining and even a waste of your time if you’re not ready. So my advice to you is to take your time and let love find you, don’t go searching for something you don’t need.