As college students somewhere between the ages of 17 and 30, all of us have had at least one romantic encounter with the opposite sex, or the same sex. Some of us have even been lucky enough to know the heartache and pain of being in a long-term relationship. I have been in the same relationship since my sophomore year of high school and, naturally, I’ve come to question it quite a bit. I’ve been considering if she is the perfect girl for me to spend the rest of my life with and if I will ever come across a proverbial “perfect girl.”
The problem in relationships is that people grow so close to each other that they become best friends and they assume that their significant other has the same interests as their previous best friend. When I used to go out with my best friend, we’d roll our windows down, blast rap music, drive to the mall, shop for about five minutes and then scour the mall for attractive girls the rest of the time. Then, we’d go to one of our houses and either watch Seinfeld or Family Guy while we ate Cheetos and coffee cakes before we made plans for the evening. It was a good life.
Then, I came across a girl and fell in love. I was in love with everything about her, but in the beginning I was able to separate my time hanging out with my friends and my time spent with her. With time, I became more and more entranced by her and started to replace my time with my friends with time with her. My time with her was a little different than what I was used to. Jay-Z was substituted with Journey, Family Guy took a backseat to The Girls Next Door and Grey’s Anatomy and junk food was replaced with apples and peanut butter.
The fact is, I’ll never be able to roll down U.S. 1 blasting Ghostface and look over to my girl bobbing her head and rapping along. I’ll never be able to spoon with my girlfriend and watch 10 episodes of Seinfeld while eating sour cream & onion Ruffles, even though those are the very things I love to do.
The resolution? Never surrender yourself, your personality and your character to your significant other. Although you’ll never be able to do the exact things you love most with your boyfriend or girlfriend, make sure to keep those friends around whom you can do those things with. At the same time, learn to love the things you do with your significant other, because most of the time it’s stuff you wouldn’t be paid to do in your old days.
Or, you can always pursue your ideal flawless significant other. What’s my idea of a perfect girl, you ask? Well, she has to look a lot like Natalie Portman, know all the lines to at least five pre-2002 Jay-Z tracks, have seen at least 90 percent of all Seinfeld episodes, not think Michael Jackson is a freak and love to dance, even if she’s worse on the floor than I am. There are quite a few more criteria, but the screening process has to start somewhere, right?
Dan Buyanovsky is a freshman majoring in entrepreneurship. He may be contacted at d.buyanovsky@umiami.edu.