Should You Break Up With Your College Girlfriend?

jtrain11 years ago

In a word? Yes.

What’s that? You want me to flesh this out? Alright. I guess TFM doesn’t pay me my weight in World War championship tank tops for four word columns, so let me see…

Allow me first to paint the rosiest of scenarios. Perhaps you love her. Maybe you think she’s perfect for you. It’s possible she tolerates, nee, celebrates your farts. The sex is fantastic, the conversation: sparkling, the blowjobs: regular and succulent, her parents: a pair of nice folks with a lake house. Perhaps you could even say you cherish her.

But she is not the one for you. And I am sure of that because there’s no such thing as “the one.” Now, this is not the dire statement of a heartbroken pessimist (ahem, Kara). This is a freeing reality, you guys. I know every movie you ever saw featured true, unimpeachable love, and every fable ended with “happily ever after.” But this is a convenient writer’s lie. It’s an escapist truism that puts butts in the seats.

Put the fiction aside and ask any honest old-timer with a successful marriage if he could have made it work with another woman and he’ll tell you, “yes” (provided the spouse isn’t around and the whiskey is free). As a matter of fact, the great irony of life is that it’s the man who could have made it work with practically anyone who enjoys the healthiest marriage. Think about it: if he’s a forgiving dude with a relaxed sense of humor, there are plenty of beautiful women with great personalities that he could get along with, some even for the rest of his life. It’s not some magical firing of neurons that makes a guy fall in love with a specific set of dimples or a certain shade of eyes. There’s not some perfect, cataclysmic event that God invokes to bring you in direct contact with your soulmate. If you believe that, at best you are an idiot, and at worst, you are cutting up magazine letters and sending some poor girl vials of your blood. What the movies don’t show is that romance will fade, breasts will sag, dicks will fail, the frumpy single best friend is still frumpy and single, and what matters in the end is not whether you love the person you’re with, but whether or not you LIKE them. And believe me, at twenty-two (or younger), you don’t know the answer to that question. Their skin is too tight, the beer bongs are too available, your parents credit card makes purchasing decisions as easy as a game of monopoly, and the stakes are too low. Of course you like her. Of course you love her. It’s college. You love Miley’s new joint. It’s too goddamn easy.

But you will doubt. You are a human, and more specifically, a man. Another thing the movies don’t tell you? It’s not college that’s a buffet of sex; it’s post-college. Girls are no longer slut-shamed by insecure or jealous sorority sisters, they have one roommate who “always sleeps at her boyfriend’s” (sucker), and the intercourse that occurs in the studio apartments converted into two bedroom closets is rampant, casual, anonymous, and sweaty. It’s fantastic and lonely at the same time. A pageantry of courage and exposed flesh, and for someone on the outside looking in, it is absolute agony. You’re an orphan with your nose pressed up against the window while the family inside is eating cooked goose.

It’s not just the sex you’re not having, but the sex you perceive your single friends to be having, which is six to seven times more than reality. And you won’t be the only one tortured by uncertainty; your girlfriend wants in on the action, too. Sure, you are her purveyor of orgasms, a lifeless assembly line of the right touches, the right licks, the right patterns, that give her climaxes as punctual as death. You even give the right post-Michael-Douglasing-nudge-tuck-and-roll that subtly says, “Me next, please.” But she wants a painter, an unpredictable artist, and she wants her body to be his masterpiece. Granted she probably won’t get it since most conquests will be too drunk to get their shirt off, but again, it’s about perception, isn’t it? The longer she stays faithful to you, the longer she’ll be convinced every one of her friends is getting fucked right out of their shoes.

So break up with her. Find the things you like and do them without her. Don’t you dream of your life after college as an adventure? An adventure filled with stories that start with “You’re never going to believe where her tongue went” and painful urination and trips to the free clinic? Don’t you see it as your own? You will experience more of life in the first two years out of college than you ever have. Do it as an individual, and you’ll come out of it smarter and more confident about what you want and who you are. And maybe, just maybe, that secure sense of self will lead to healthier, happier relationships later. Or you can live with doubt, finding your way in this big world with a view obscured by someone else’s shadow.

Perhaps you cherish her. I’m sorry, tough break. You guys met at the wrong time. There’s still some great love you’ll find, and be happy with, and possibly marry. Maybe you guys will have babies you put in pictures holding empty beer bottles. Adorable. And you’ll love her, not because her eyes look like the moon reflecting off of a deep ocean. Not because you’re soul mates, but because she makes sense to you and you’re both fully-realized individuals, and you work on it and you guys laugh a lot. But that’s quite a bit of ways away, isn’t it? So in the meantime, why not get some of that sweet hot random fat vag all your friends are talking about? It tastes like freedom and a little like copper.