Though the cycle of college dating often seems to blur together into one grossly tangled mess, it is up to dating professionals not to forget that this flurry of madness is, at its core, nothing more than a series of predictable stages. For example, there is the dinner and a movie stage, the lay around and do nothing stage and, my personal favorite, the “Wanna just rent a movie?” stage. As much as I would love to describe these stages in detail, it seems time for me to address the 900-pound gorilla that is currently weighing down this article. And so, without further ado, I will now dive into my first and last article on the topic of one of the most emotionally charged stages in a relationship: that of breaking up.
As much as we would all like to ignore the prospect of heartbreak, it happens to the best of us. (Don’t think you’re safe if you’re among the worst of us.) We find ourselves in these situations of heartbreak where the decisions are not our own, where we are forced to chase, rather than fall into, our future. Using poker terms, we essentially go on tilt.
It’s a bit weird — for most of our lives we’ve been told that if something is too good to be true, it probably is. For some reason though, everyone takes their guards down when there is a chance for love in the mix. For you college students out there to chase romance with reckless abandon, it’s hard to trash such a reflex too harshly. Though this lack of defense is the cause of all bad breakups, it is also what gives me the opportunity to write a dating column.
You might be asking yourselves, who is left to take the blame? Was it short-sightedness? Was I too overbearing? Was it that time she caught me watching “Pokemon?” Such questions are always the natural result of a breakup, but they will neither be answered nor be of any help. This is because the truth of the matter is that there is no thing, no one and no event to blame. There is only the fact that at one moment in time at least one piece of the puzzle went missing, and now it’s nowhere to be found.
It can drive a person mad trying to figure out the problem, trying to find the fatal flaw — and it doesn’t help that every time you allow yourself to forget you end up finding something of theirs, or something belonging to both of you. Every time you get a free moment you think in the back of your mind you should call your ex, but then you remember that he or she no longer wants to hear your voice. That person no longer cares when you go to bed or when you head out with friends. There is no one there who wants to hear about every moment of your day, no matter how boring or ridiculous it has been. And, probably worst of all, there is no one on the other line who needs you to do nothing more than care about what his or her day has been like.
Breaking up, in summary, is a pretty big downer. But to borrow a quote from one of my favorite movies “Blow:” “Sometimes you’re flush and sometimes you’re bust, and when you’re flush it’s never as good as it seems, and when you’re down you never think you’ll be up again, but life goes on.” Because you see, at the end of the day, there will always be at least as many ups as there are downs in the world of dating, and for some there will be one more up that carries them for the rest of their lives. But even if every triumph is followed shortly by a pitfall, at least we can say we weren’t afraid to play the game. And, if we’re all being honest, I think it’s everyone’s deepest desire to just be a baller. Ballin’!
Andy’s column runs biweekly Mondays. He can be reached at a.taylor@cavalierdaily.com.
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