Rocky or rock solid, maintaining a balance between your commitments to school, work, family, love and personal responsibilities can be tough, and many times hard to keep up with.

Although many college relationships have lasted beyond graduation, the reality of maintaining a monogamous romantic companionship throughout and after college is almost unrealistic. Once you get to college you’re forced to re-prioritize your life. This means re-characterizing what you consider a “need to do” and a “want to do,” and many times relationships end up being last on that to-do list.

Also, friends and environment play a large role in whether or not some will choose to be in a relationship while in college. Many students feel as if they’re missing out on something, so they either participate in open relationships or they rush into the first relationship that’s offered to them in order to fill a void and seek what they feel they’re missing.

Because so much emphasis has been placed on the expectancy to find your soul mate while in college, many students feel they should maintain open relationships in order to not miss the opportunity to find that “one.” Also, some college students feel the need to have open relationships in order to fulfill their desires for lust so when “the one” does come along, they will feel as though they’ve played the field enough to make a true commitment to one person.

Are college relationships hard to keep? Yes, because college students have an exceptional amount of responsibility and tons of commitments. Not just those to companions, and again, we must prioritize which of our commitments is most important and this is done regularly on a day-to-day, case-by-case basis. However, this does not mean that we as college students are incapable of achieving healthy monogamous relationships, if that’s what we want.

Many people confuse an individual not wanting a committed relationship with the inability to achieve a committed relationship. For example, an individual who commits themselves to one person while continuing to court multiple companions is not incapable of achieving monogamy, but simply uninterested in being with just one person – some just haven’t come to this realization yet.

Interesting enough, those who experience this confusion most often are not those who take on multiple courtships, but those who have been hurt by another’s inability to be honest about the type of relationship they truly wanted. In order to excuse another’s disinterest in being committed to us, we’ve adopted the phrase incapable rather than unwilling in order to soften the blow.

The decision whether to date in college or to be in a committed relationship should not be as hard as we make it out to be. This type of decision is based on one’s maturity level and sincerity towards commitment. In a relationship, you must say what you mean, and mean what you say. It’s important to know that whatever decision you choose to make, honesty with yourself and others is the key to keeping your integrity.

Talecia Bell can be reached at [email protected]