College is, for most people, your first time out in the world as an adult. You’re independent, living without parents and the rules and supervision that come with them. And you simply can’t fly the nest if you’ve still got one wing caught in the twigs.
That’s what your high school sweetheart does. They hold you back. You may hear people talk of being held back from the “college experience”—this is an accurate line, if often misguided. It need not be about wanting to explore other relationships in college, but is instead about the experience of starting your new life. You are now an adult, settling into a new place, free to make your own decisions. While you can make the decision to continue to date the person you decided to spend all your time with as a child, you must recognize that in doing so, you limit your ability to grow and to invent yourself which is the true essence of the college experience.
Let’s consider the two different scenarios you may be in and how they are indeed not so different after all.
Scenario 1: Long Distance. You are going to different colleges, perhaps an hour or more away from each other. This makes you both upset, not wanting to leave each other after having a carefree, memorable summer together. The excitement of college move-in is thwarted by the reality of a goodbye much more painful to the average teen than any family member could possibly induce.
Maybe you try to make friends in the first few days. You explore campus, go to your exciting new classes, and meet some cool people. Your first thought is that you simply can’t wait to go back to your dorm later and tell your partner all about it. But while you’re happily FaceTiming away all evening, those new friends are still out there, hanging out with each other. They consolidate those friendships. They meet new people. A couple days and FaceTimes later, and your new friends have already forgotten all about you.
Maybe your sweetheart is out there making friends too! They can’t call you back because they’ve made other plans. What if they like their new friends more than they like you? What if they are better off without you? You begin to overthink. Your imagination fuels the horrible dread that you’re growing apart and powers the jealousy for the person who gets to sit next to them in their college chemistry class. Before you know it, you don’t have friends here, and you feel like you’re losing your special faraway friend, too.
When you eventually visit each other, you realize your relationship has taken a turn for the worse—you are each strangers in the other’s life and have become absent from your own.
Scenario 2: Short-distance. You are going to the same city, or maybe even the same college. Yay! So exciting! You will be together forever! NO.
You think you have a constant friend now. You’ll never be lonely. What you really have is a constant distraction, even worse than the one that is far away. Now you can confidently hang out with your sweetheart all day long and not feel bad about it. You can neglect to make new friends entirely because you already feel like you’re being social.
If you do make friends, they will know you as a couple, not as an individual. Maybe they actually like your partner better than you, and when you two do break up, everyone rushes to their side, leaving you in the dust.
If you still aren’t convinced, look at the numbers. Brandon Gaille Marketing states that only 2% of marriages are from high school relationships. While everyone thinks they could be part of the 2%, that is a very low number considering you are lucky if you find a spouse at all. Even then, among those who jump the gun and marry their high school sweetheart young, only 54% will last 10 years. It’d be great to beat the odds, but get real: if you’ve kept reading this far into this article, you’re clearly having some doubts.
You know nothing in high school. As an 18-year-old senior in the same school you’ve been at for years, in the town in which you’ve grown, you feel on top of the world. You are not. You think that person you’ve been dating since you sat together in chemistry class freshman year is your future spouse. You are wrong.
Save yourself some pain. Nip it in the bud. Drop the dead weight. Get active.
Andrew Spielmann ’25 (andrewspielmann@college.harvard.edu) is actually a romantic at heart but just loves to play devil’s advocate.