The Dos and Donts of Being in a Relationship When Starting Uni

The best piece of advice I can offer re: being in a relationship at university is: to not be. I know that sounds cynical – who among us has not said "I love you" to their sixth-form boyfriend from the passenger seat of a Corsa and meant it with the full force of their being – but I promise you it's a terrible idea, because one of the following things will definitely happen:

– You will be cheated on.
– You will cheat on someone.
– You will admirably struggle to make it work over the course of three to four years, and then break up immediately after graduation.
– You will maintain an effortless balance between your relationship, friendships and personal space in a way that makes everyone around you feel jealous and incapable. You'll move in together after uni, get engaged in your late-twenties and only post on Instagram when you're on combined family holidays in the south of France. Two weeks before the wedding, each of you will panic whisper something to a friend about "doubts" and "problems in the bedroom" but go through with it anyway, stay together forever and spend every unoccupied minute fantasising about running off with the barista who works at the Caffè Nero by your office.

As someone whose undergraduate experience saw the end of one long-term relationship, the beginning of another and a six-month period between the two, during which I had loads of fun, I would say: leave it. Enjoy the one period of your life in which it's actually fine to be a bit selfish, unencumbered. That said, it's important to make mistakes in order to learn from them. Also, if you're reading this in genuine pursuit of advice, you're probably still at an age where you're not actually interested in hearing other people's thoughts on your decision-making, especially when it says "don't do that thing you want to do" and is coming from a 29-year-old idiot monetising their emotional problems for a living on VICE.

So, fine. Whatever. We’ll have it your way.

To their credit, my parents are not pushy people. If they were, I'd have had a harrowing time studying law at an inner-city university and re-taken my Grade 6 piano exam. But this was not my destiny. Instead, I aced four A-Levels to end up doing creative writing somewhere with an entry requirement of one C, in a town smaller than the one I came from, because it was an hour away from my boyfriend. "Can't wait to spend my formative years propped up against that big tree reading Keats alone," I told myself on Open Day, knowing full well I would spend the next 18 months on Facebook messenger, spunking half my student loan on train fair. Ah, precious memories.

It wasn't a terrible decision. The 60 minute buffer worked out alright, and it seems reasonable enough not to want to venture too far away from what you know. What should be avoided, though, is: ditching your own plans and following your high school sweetheart to their first UCAS choice. Or: not doing a year abroad because you've got feelings for someone on your course and you want to see if they mean anything. And: mapping out the next five years of your life based on the aspirations of someone you met at a traffic light party.

Forget critical thinking, this is the most important skill you* will learn in your early twenties. Start with templates, if you have to – all great artists start out copying the work of people they admire before honing it into original creative output. Be bold, experiment with forms. By the end, you'll have a BA Joint Honours in History and Taking Videos Of Your Butt On Instagram Direct To Be Viewed Once Before Disappearing From The Conversation Forever.

*I'm talking mostly to men who sleep with women here, obviously. Thanks to having little to no sexual representation in mainstream culture and having to explore our agency by cybering with predators online, everyone else is already proficient beyond a text that says "bby" followed by a graceless shot of their hog.

At least half the benefits of going to university are experiential, even more so if you're doing a humanities degree. And while "someone who used to be on Hollyoaks doing a DJ set at the Student's Union vs 48 hours of pure shagging" may not seem like much of a contest at the time, it'll inevitably come back to haunt you when someone you met twice at freshers week finishes telling you a funny story about at something that happened at [what you’re assuming is a club night?] involving [several names you don’t recognise but feel like you should so you feign recognition and nod along enthusiastically], then asks what you’ve been up to and you realise you've spent 107 consecutive Saturdays in Nottingham.

Communication and consideration are the cornerstones of any successful relationship, but four months ago your mum was still regularly having a go at you for picking your nose and wiping it on the wall by your bed, so let's look at ways to establish necessary autonomy through the prism of these far more realistic scenarios.

SCENARIO 1
Your partner: reasonably frowns upon narcotics, but is rather unreasonably trying to force this opinion on you by being judgmental about the whole thing.
You: quite want to have a go on the MDMA that someone has enthusiastically copped from a man called "Minty" who still lives the same house as he did when he graduated from your course five years ago.
Resolution: Have a go on the MDMA, hun. If someone can't handle you at your "clutching a water bottle and grinding your teeth to dust at an 80s cheese night", they don’t deserve you at your "shall we watch Nanette, it’s supposed to be really good". Go forth and sesh safely. Anyway, in three years, you'll be over it and they'll be escaping the mundanity of their graphic design job by getting bang into ketamine.

SCENARIO 2
Your partner: thinks you should read this theory book because there's some quite interesting points in there about counterculture andsasiufhkjwsdfjwndskjhfablah.
You: can't really be arsed.
Resolution: Fuck it. Read something you’re actually interested in and tell them to take it to a subReddit.

Point being: you do you. Inevitably, someone will be the Bigger Personality in the relationship and that person often ends up getting their way on the grounds of confidence alone, but there’s no point pandering to that at this stage. Or do, I guess. Either way, it’ll all go to shit when you start outgrowing the shape of the person you’ve unintentionally moulded yourself into for them and start doing really reactional things like getting a super weird haircut or becoming a memelord. However –

Good rule of thumb here for the monogamous, but bears hammering in like a mantra to fall back on when you’ve been thrown into a social environment that is essentially Love Island but with thousands more people who are far less attractive and yet you fancy every single one of them purely on the basis that they didn’t go to your secondary school.

Imagine the unique mixture of horror and awkwardness of bumping into a one-night stand in a supermarket. The strained how's-it-goings; the fidgeting with your hair and clothes, hoping they don't notice that it's 1PM and you’re very obviously on your way home from a night out; the over-compensatory laughter; the overwhelming shame of being forced to look the person directly in the eye while holding two boxes of sausage rolls and smelling bad. Now imagine that feeling every time you need to use your own toilet.

You can tell everything about a person by what their friends are like. If you don’t get on with theirs or vice versa, it’s probably doomed. It’s very easy to confine a relationship to the bubble you established in the beginning, when you got to know each other exclusively in various coffee shops and two bedrooms. Now, your entire opinion of them is based on how they are in relation to you without really knowing how they function in society at large, and you won’t know how to react when they tag along to a birthday meal and get into a heated argument with one of your housemates about Facebook.

If you love something, set it free; if it comes back, it probably left something of sentimental value at your house.

Realistically, what happens to most high school or university-born romances is you will outgrow one another, because that’s what happens when you form relationships before you’ve properly formed your personality. However, it’s very hard to recognise this without the aid of life experience or a therapist, and so you will deal with it by lashing out in a variety of spiteful ways, such as eyeing up their friends and suddenly deciding to loathe all their favourite bands. You will later come to understand that this is the trajectory of most relationships, regardless of age, because people alter constantly over the course of a lifetime and it is actually very rare and difficult to be able to do that harmoniously in tandem with each other. So perhaps the best thing is to not get into any relationships? At all? Maybe just adopt an old, blind cat that’s totally dependant on you, channel all your emotional energy into that and get really into increasingly niche porn until the concept of intercourse becomes purely academic? I don’t know. Just thinking out loud.

For more advice on starting university, read this essential guide we put together a few years ago.

@emmaggarland