This Halloween brought an array of ironic costumes including my personal favorite: a t-shirt that solely said “commitment” because it was bound to scare a majority of college students.
Committed relationships in college can be hard to come by, especially since we’ve introduced the concept of “talking,” a term that means two people romantically involved and are essentially behaving as if they are in a relationship except without the commitment and label.
This has become more common than actual relationships during our college years and could actually be ruining our relationship with, you guessed it, relationships.
This stems from our generation’s inability to commit to one thing or person in the event that something better may come along. It is much easier to end something that isn’t clearly defined, allowing people to leave their options open the entire time they are seeing someone in case they are no longer satisfied by their current situation.
According to a survey done by Gallup, in the last 10 years, the rate of non-committed young adults has risen about 12 percent. This further shows that our generation is guilty of this lack of commitment because of our obsession with keeping our options open.
The culture of “talking” has only allowed us to continue feeding this problem and making non-committed relationships become the norm. I realized this was a problem when I spoke to a girl who seemed madly in love and was very excited to be “talking” to her guy and stated happily that “in a few months maybe we might actually start dating!”
The title of an actual relationship seems like a trophy that must be earned through months and months of basically being in a relationship without pressuring the other person with commitment.
While college is a great time to explore and meet as many people as possible to help figure out who we are, faking relationships won’t get you any more satisfaction than figuring out if what you truly want is to be single or in a relationship.
All of the confusion that comes with this kind of relationship hinders a successful bond between two people while also taking for granted the time another person may be giving you. Leaving our options open by not completely committing means that we are continuing to feed the mentality that there must be something better out there that you would miss out on if there was a commitment.
The most important thing we can do to fix this generational phenomenon is know what we want and not settle for less, whether that is being single or in a relationship. We owe it to the people we are dating to state our true intentions, and we also owe it to ourselves to have what we truly want.
If we genuinely like the person we are “talking” to, we need to let go of our fear of commitment and let go of “the grass is greener” mentality that is holding us back from enjoying what we have. We deserve stop letting our fear of missing out hinder us for getting the satisfying relationship we were looking for in the first place.