Relationships are hard. Relationships in college are difficult, and maintaining college relationships after you’ve graduated can feel damn near impossible.
Whether you and your partner met while doing keg stands at a frat party or while sharing a table at the library studying for the upcoming biochem exam, your college relationship is likely built on a shared mutual lifestyle that developed through your higher education years. You’ve shared classes and dorms together, you’ve attended late night parties together, you’ve spent afternoons complaining about professors you both hate and talking about local jobs you’re applying for to make ends meet while you complete your studies.
But post-graduation, everything looks very different. Suddenly, the sturdy base of shared moments and interests you developed throughout college are very different from the base you need to sustain your relationship in the real world. It’s tough to predict whether yours will make it through the transition for a few key reasons.
1. Your daily schedule looks a lot different
Once you get out of college and start looking for jobs, your schedule looks a lot different, especially if you enter a full-time, 9-to-5 job. Gone were the days when your life was documented by shifts—class shifts, part-time job shifts, hours in the day you could easily head to your dorm room for a mid-afternoon Netflix session with your partner.
Now you’re working all day, and when you come home it’s probably to a partner who has shared nothing of the past eight hours of your life. You don’t see them at all in the daytime except on weekends. Suddenly you have to build a relationship based on what you do outside of work, rather than the free time between shifts. Suddenly, you have a career you need to develop in a different institution from your partner’s. This change in schedule is not incompatible with building a relationship, but it’s probably a fundamentally different lifestyle from the one your college relationship was built on.
2. Your visions of the future may differ
For many couples, what happens after college remains an uncomfortable conversation they put off until suddenly it happens—they’re post-college graduates. Did you take the time to decide you both want to stay in the same city and make sacrifices to stay together, or did you both secretly know you would always prioritize your personal goals over your partner’s? That’s not a bad thing to do. Your career will play a significant role in defining your life, and you shouldn’t feel guilty about ending a relationship to make decisions about your future.
However, if you wanted to stay together without ever having The Talk, you may find that you’re caught between a rock and a hard place. What if you can’t find any good jobs in the city your partner wants to live in? What if you want to continue your education in a particular school, but your partner wants to live in a particular area somewhere else? For most people, you will begin your career after graduation. Will you both be able to begin your careers in the same city? How compatible are your visions of the future?
3. Your understanding of love changes
Post-graduation, your daily responsibilities, motivations and interests shift. Suddenly you’re a tax-paying employee working full-time. You probably have a place of your own you have to maintain, more bills to pay than ever before and new desires and motivations. What you imagine love is might change in this transition. It goes from fancy dates to quietly remembering to take out the trash for you in the morning. It changes from writing you love songs to packing you leftovers for lunch the next day so you won’t have to buy any. Love changes from grand gestures to helping you build a life together. Not every college relationship is going to last through that transition.
Entering the real world is a tough and scary endeavor. Although it may feel impossible to imagine doing it without your partner, the partner you wanted and needed in college may not be the right partner for you post graduation. Don’t be afraid to let yourself, your relationship and your future grow by holding onto old relationships.