College dating: An important season of possible misery

Dating has been on my mind lately. I’ve reflected on romantic companionship’s role during college and the wide spectrum of my life.

Sometimes an agent of the opposite gender blows my mind so much I rethink everything I know about, well, everything.

Don’t worry, I’ll keep my digressions focused.

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I could not help but feel dirty, a little overwhelmed and damaged re-examining every little scrape and scar left on my heart and mind.

Few of us get through college without getting entangled in hairy relationship problems. Those who have managed to avoid them, and relationships as a whole, find themselves in other issues. Either way, everyone has come across some relation-based, character-defining moment in his or her life.

So what are we doing it for?

It is as simple as this — the rate at which an individual changes and how they handle those changes.

A relationship can be related to sharing a body of water. If you jump into a pool of water, you become a part of a larger body. What you do affects the water, and what happens to the water affects you.

If the lifeguard throws a huge boulder into the deep end, you’ll surely move with the ripples. If you go off into the deep end when you can’t swim, you’ll pull your companion down in an attempt to stay up.

In high school, most of us are getting used to the idea of swimming in our pools and sharing the water with someone. We are all dependents in high school; therefore, the way we use our pools is limited in respect to

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our dependency.

However, we enter college as independents and can do what we want. The way that we share and use our pools no longer contain limitations. The deep end is no longer roped off, and there is no lifeguard on duty.

Our previous attempts at “love” are still so important, despite how hairy, messy and painful they may have been. You’ve learned who you are, what you want and, most importantly, how you handle the changing waters.

A good relationship is in no way a stagnant and consistent phenomenon. It changes like the seasons. It sticks together through the scorching summers and even closure during the cold winters.

Love dies so that it can be born again, like a garden shared with your lover fed by the four seasons. If only I could take my eyes from my own scrapes and scars and get to tilling.

Jared Kingry

Senior from Omaha, Neb. studying philiopshy

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