With another school year upon us, we offer a lesson that bears repeating: No, you and your sweetheart probably will not be faithful to each other while you’re away at college, no matter what you tell each other.
The same thing happens during the lead-up to every school year. A slew of young couples–perhaps high school sweethearts, inseparable–engage in a loving embrace as they temporarily bid farewell to venture off to college. Tears are shed by both sullen lovers as the parents finish packing up the cars, one eventually driving East, the other West, while a sad song plays in the background. But never fear: These bright-eyed striplings bound for academia have promised that they’ll be together forever in the long run. Even if they’re apart for a few long, excruciating months as they both settle into the grueling work that will help them create the perfect life together, complete with that big house on the hill, a white picket fence, 2.5 kids, a dog, and all the happiness ever after…well, that will be worth it, right? Sure, it’s hard knowing that you won’t see their little love muffin quite as often. Harder still is eventually accepting the reality that their college-bound cutie is almost assuredly going to be banging some stranger in due time.
Mother Goose and her band of fairy tale-slinging goons have pulled the wool over the eyes of the young and clueless. All their nonsense has them believing that, as long as they love each other deeply enough, their bond cannot be broken, not by the mightiest forces of the universe, and certainly not by something as trivial as a semester apart. These lovestruck squirts may vow to stay faithful to each other while they’re off at their respective schools, but rest assured, well before finals week, one of the two (and probably both) will have wandered astray. “All it takes is one of them getting hammered at a party one night and it’s over,” Shelton, 32, of Little Rock, Arkansas, tells HUSTLERMagazine.com. “That’s party years.”
Unfortunately, Shelton is right. Most high school sweethearts trying to keep the relationship alive through college simply aren’t going to make it. Oh, sure, a sliver will survive the entire freshman year, but they’ll bite the big one soon enough. Most won’t even last three months into the first semester. The reason, as Shelton so eloquently points out, is because hormones, booze and loads of attractive young people walking around in a place where there’s no parental figures or significant others (what was their name again?) makes the youth… go… wild. College is party central for most sprightly academics, and that means somewhere along the way somebody is going to slip up and fuck somebody else. Nobody knows this as well as Jake, 45, who tells us he was in a committed, three-year relationship with a girl when he landed at the University of Southern Illinois many years ago. That’s where he learned a valuable lesson in the volatility of puppy love.
“I went to this house party the first week of school and met this gorgeous girl,” he recalls. “We ended up fucking in the bathroom later that night and I was like, Wow, college is going to be great!”
