I’ll give you some background:
My boyfriend and I are preparing to graduate from high school in May. After 2 and 1/2 years of not just dating, but becoming best friends, we are headed to the same university. We’ve discussed our future often, and right now we hope to get married in four years. I don’t feel like some silly teenager in puppy love, but due to my lack of life experience, I really don’t have much to go off of. Our parents are aware of our intentions, are supportive, but also recognize that our college educations come first.
So my questions are: have any of you stayed with your sweetheart after graduation? How did it work out? Do you have any advice for those who are young and in love? Are we just setting ourselves up for heartbreak later on?
Well, I consciously met my wife in seventh grade back in the fall of 1959 (a great-aunt claims we’d played together as toddlers, but neither of us remembers it). We didn’t marry until six years after college, but we’ve been together 43 years and seven months, and married 28 years and four days as of this post.
If you want a quick bit of perspective, try to identify honestly to yourselves the negatives about each other – sure you’re in love with each other, but do you love each other in the other sense – the one that you’ll be happy together twenty years from now sitting around watching TV and waiting for your kids to get home from whatever they’re at? Try to think that through honestly before you make any formal commitments to each other – romance is wonderful, and I’ll never knock it, but you need that other kind of love with the staying power to make a successful marriage out of it. One thing very much in your favor is “not just dating, but becoming best friends” – every happy marriage I know the partners in well enough to have them talk about their marriage, they’ve referred to each other that way. Something else that’s good is the amount of self-awareness in your post – recognizing that your life experience is relatively limited, for example. That ability to distance yourself from yourself and make those sorts of judgments will pay off big in the future.
I’ve got a bad highschool sweetheart story.
You probably don’t want to hear it.
Let’s just say that after 3.5 years (plus 3 year friendship before the relationship) he broke up with me for another girl; got engaged to her 2 months later; married a year later. Now, whenever we see each other, he acts as
But there are success stories, and I wish you and your boyfriend all the best. Just whatever happens, be sure to learn from it and become a stronger and better person for it.
Just love each other, and be honest. And be realistic about life and your goals.
I’ve got a bad highschool sweetheart story.
You probably don’t want to hear it.
Let’s just say that after 3.5 years (plus 3 year friendship before the relationship) he broke up with me for another girl; got engaged to her 2 months later; married a year later. Now, whenever we see each other, he acts as
But there are success stories, and I wish you and your boyfriend all the best. Just whatever happens, be sure to learn from it and become a stronger and better person for it.
Just love each other, and be honest. And be realistic about life and your goals.
Don’t be afraid of continuing your relationship. If you drift apart in college, it just happens. Heartbreak later on is better than heartbreak right now. My high school GF and I agreed to break up for for “Entirely Rational Reasons” after graduation.
In the years that have followed, I have often wished we’d been less rational and followed our hearts instead. I have wished we had given “us” a chance to continue on.
You can always end a relationship that no longer works, if it reaches that point in the future. Break Humpty-Dumpty to pieces on purpose, and it’s usually not possible to put him back together again.
I met my high school sweetheart in the 11th grade, at age 15. We dated thruout high school, then went to college 800 miles apart. We dated others, but kept in touch. By the end of college we realized we wanted to be together, so she moved to the city where I went to med school. We married two years later. We’ve been married nearly 22 years.
It worked out quite nicely. I don’t know why we were so lucky.
So go for it. It could work out. But be open to the possibility that it won’t. Let it happen, and don’t get clingy.
My ex-girlfriend (who I hooked up with the summer before I started college) broke up with me “because we’re going to meet so many new people and who knows and blah blah blah.” She went on to go out with an old boyfriend shortly thereafter. Break up for reasons like you can’t stand each other or something. Just my input.