Originally published in print March 2021.
Illustration by Emily Stevenson.
College is many things. It’s a wonderful place full of new and exciting experiences with so many opportunities to learn things about yourself that you may never previously have known. It gives so much and takes so much away that by the end of the years, I have now found myself asking; ‘What did I learn?’ – aside from the content of my degree, of course.
1st year
First year was a rollercoaster. From the start until the finish it was full of new faces, names and places that easily becomes a blur where you can’t remember anything. What I learned about love and relationships from this year was simple: do not expect what you see in films and television. There were no meet-cutes and no spontaneous meeting of the love of my life. In reality, many of the people I dated in first year taught me that dating can really be a tribulation. The first tinder date I went on whilst at Trinity resulted in me waiting outside a pub for an hour to meet someone who was clearly not interested once they eventually showed up. Worse still, I did not seem to grasp this disinterest until quite soon after the date had ended when I asked to meet up again and was subsequently told that the person was busy for the whole next month. I’m not blaming them for being uninterested of course – it just would have served me to be a little more perceptive. My love life fared no better for the rest of the year, with many unrequited crushes occupying my mind from January through to May. It was this year that I learnt that liking people was not like it was in secondary school, where you can get thrown into situations set up by friends. See I had never put in the actual work before – I had ended up in relationships through the expertise of my friends and many relationships that I had at this time were a result of other people’s toil.and meeting and getting to know new people in college was actually pretty difficult.
2nd year
Second year taught me there’s a difference between infatuation and genuine feelings. I encountered my first true ‘f**kboy’ this year and if I could go back in time to tell myself something it was that I did not like this person, I liked the idea of them. I learned a lot about how idealising people,building someone up in your head and holding them to a standard they will never meet will not make you happy. I learnt this not only from my own experiences but from those of my friends, who I saw get caught out time and time again by people who did not truly care about them. Of course, while I gave them advice, it was not until the following year that I could follow this advice myself. Second year also taught me the value of trust. It taught me that someone can seem like they respect you and act like they’ve taken on board the various boundaries you’ve set in your relationships, only for them to surprise and ultimately disappoint you. For me, this led to a complete breakdown in a relationship that easily could have been avoided. Second year was not a great year for my perception of love; I was left slightly jaded with the idea that the adult dating experience was nothing more than a series of inconclusive and disappointing mishaps.
3rd year
Third year taught me a lot while also leaving me with very little. It taught me about my own self-worth and how communicating your needs to your partner is one of the most important things you can do, even if it spells out the end of your relationship. It taught me the value of truly letting someone go, and that sometimes the best decision doesn’t always feel like the right one at the time.
During Third year, I dated someone who I saw something working out with. It took a few months of dating for this person to finally communicate their uncertainty over whether they could commit to me. While it hurt to let them go, it was empowering to know that I’d made the best decision for the both of us in the end, and I do wish them happiness.This year also made me realise that college is actually very small and you may think that you’ll neve hear from someone again until you start to see them on a weekly basis completely by chance and the wonders of Trinity timetabling. As tortuous as they feel at the time, I learnt that all these awkward encounters will make for very good comedic material when you’re a bit older and reminiscing over…. In third year, I learnt how prioritise myself and to really commit to figuring out what I want. I was making wonderful progress, only for it to all be plunged into chaos by a global pandemic. During the first period of lockdown, I found that suddenly the only love that mattered was the familial and platonic love that I have for friends.
4th year
It’s now nearly the end of my final year, and what a year it’s been. Much like in first year, there are new and challenging experiences that my classmates and I never envisioned facing. There are a different set of criteria for how we interact with each other and face-to-face meetings are almost null and void. In spite of…, this was the year that things changed for me. It seems fitting to say that all my Christmases came at once. Now that I am a little bit older, not only did I realise that those people I thought were oh-so-cool are actually not that cool at all, but I also found that love truly does come when you least expect it. Meeting someone in the middle of a global pandemic was not something. This meeting resulting in a relationship was something I expected even less. If I could go back right now to my first-year self and tell her not to try so hard I would, but had I not done that, maybe I would not have realised that I never had to in the first place. Maybe I wouldn’t have learnt that when it comes to those who it did not work out with there was nothing wrong with either of us, it was just not meant to be. To these people, I say thank you for the lessons you taught me.
To finish this ‘story’ (if you will) with some form of universally applicable adage, I guess I would say that what my four years at Trinity have taught me about love is that the more you try to force it, the less it works. When love is meant to happen, it will – don’t stress!
