By Sarah Murnane
Step One: Find a Partner
The first step in meeting your life partner in college is of course, to start introducing yourself to potential candidates. This can happen in many circumstances, in a lecture, tutorial or course night out, the possibilities are immense. If you are in an arts course you will find the brown haired, slightly awkward and anaemic boy in your course an attractive option. He asks you out after one gin and tonic and after a week of dating insist that you are ‘the one’. This seems like the perfect option, how romantic! Yet, after three weeks his constant puppy-like need for attention grows wearing. It is no longer an option to ignore how his ears are just infinitesimally too big for his head. You break-up with him, he cries, you maintain that the next one will be better.
For those in STEM the process is slightly different: you will date any man who wears a zip up and chino’s to college, he cheats on you within the first week. You then hang around the arts block for the next three years.
Step Two: Gain Experience
Now following boy number one, you realise there is much more to college life. There are societies, events and ‘big names on campus’, and any one of these groups could be hosting the potential love of your life. Join all you can and scout them for the most confident, perceptively interesting and involved boy you can. He wears an eclectic mix of charity shop clothes and says things to you like “You know if you lost a bit of weight you’d look exactly like Winona Ryder”. He is fun to date, he knows everyone and you get to go to parties all the time. He helps you write your college essays and knows what a clitoris is (or at least pretends to, and you are too anxious to confront him). Eventually, his constant drama between societies and individuals wears on you. You do not care who forgot to fill up the free condom box this week, nor do you think that person is a fascist. Another break-up, less dramatic but he insists to your mutual friends that you are ‘crazy’ and ‘sex obsessed’.
Step Three: Exhaustion
By now you are tired of this rigmarole. You’ve gone on dates with people but nothing is sticking, they are all copies of each other with little to give. This was not the dream you were promised, by now you should be well on your way to an engagement and planning your future masters degree with a fun and sexy partner. A new strategy is born. Your friends hear you say “I’m just going to focus on myself for awhile”, and “I don’t really need a relationship, I have friends and college, if it happens it happens”. Then, the most terrifying thing happens: you meet a boy who went to school in South Dublin.
He is charming and boyish, with a vest for life you haven’t found in awhile. He has never had a job for longer than two months, and vomits after one drag of a joint. His friends are a strange group of the same person, only differentiated by how much money their families have and whether their parents are divorced or not. When you go to his room he has a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Kitchen Confidential and The Artists Way all in a row. He writes bad poetry for the college paper and admits to joining female based societies because “girls are so much easier to talk to”. He has a cocaine habit and forgets that he agreed to meet you sometimes, but that seems like a fun quirk in personality.
Although something is never quite right. There is an overwhelming urge of, settling. You observe his parents. They met in college, in the same way, they have been together thirty years now. You notice how the idea of living this life uneases you. Dealing with this man for the rest of your life, teaching him to cook, clean and be a person seems less and less appealing. Eventually he decides to move to Brussels, or Berlin or Australia and you put up no resistance seeing it as an easy way out.
Step Four: Realisation
Everybody needs somebody, it is unreasonable to aspire that we will always be comfortable on our own. It is worse to settle with someone unlikeable then spend time waiting for the right person. You will likely not meet the love of your life in college, but fear not as one day you’ll download a dating app on a whim, go on a random date, and meet someone wonderful. The meantime will merely be story collecting for dinner parties with your friends later on in life.