Way back in the day when I was a college student, I was clueless and didn’t understand this. I had a friend who after 2 yr at our university, decided to transfer out of state to the same college where her boyfriend was attending. They’d met back in her home town after she graduated from high school.
We all wished her well and missed her a lot and kept in touch after she moved. At the time, I and all of our mutual friends thought that her parents were mean and horrible people because:
a. they told her not to transfer just to follow the boyfriend
b. they told her that they would pay no more than what the in-state tuition was costing at the in-state university she was previously attending
c. they told her that they would give her no more living expense money per month than what they were giving her per month at the in-state university
d. they told her that they would not help her move her stuff and that she’d have to figure it out on her own.
e. they told her that they didn’t think that the boyfriend was a good influence since he’d gotten into big trouble in high school for bringing a stun gun to school to show his friends and he used it on one of his classmates.
f. she was going to have to take out a ton of student loans & work a lot at part time jobs in order to make ends meet.
A couple of years later, she and the boyfriend (the one she’d moved to another state for) broke up. Many many years after that, his life took a downward turn. He fell into heavy drug use, lost his primo job at a good company, and for awhile was renting a room in a hotel by the week…the sort of place that is frequented by all sorts of nefarious characters. So she definitely dodged a bullet there when she & the boyfriend parted ways years before that.
Looking back, the major that the friend was studying was not something that was particularly specialized or better in the OOS school vs the in-state school that she’d previously attended. Nor was the OOS school “ranked higher” or anything like that. She pretty much wanted to get away from her parents, away from the school that they had picked for her, and wanted to make her own way in the world.
Years later now, I look back at this from a parent’s point of view and I see that situation in a completely different light.
While me and my high school-to-college boyfriend stayed together and eventually got married (and still are married), one of the things I have frequently commented on here is that I wish I had spent less time in college nurturing our fledgling relationship and more time being a young adult and enjoying college. I had a good time generally speaking, but I spent so much time trying to grow up too fast and thinking about our future together, getting married, trying to be serious and attached and all that that I missed opportunities that don’t present themselves again.
It kind of doesn’t matter whether the boyfriend (or girlfriend) becomes a drug dealer or becomes a successful investment banker with a vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard…the impact on your development in the moment can be pretty big. It also kind of doesn’t matter whether you stay together or not…students who have the privilege of going to college, especially living in residence halls away from home, have a really special opportunity to dive fully into developing and being somewhat selfish for four to five years of their lives. I’m not saying you can’t date or even date seriously, but once you start contemplating sacrificing your own best interests for someone else…that’s when you should ponder deeply.
I was absolutely certain I would marry my high school boyfriend. He was a year ahead of me. He went off to Stanford, and the following year, I went to Mount Holyoke. We decided that I would transfer either to Stanford or Santa Clara after my sophomore year and then get married.
Halfway thru my freshman year, I realized that I didn’t want to go to school in CA (I only applied to east coast schools for a reason) and I certainly didn’t want to marry him, or anyone else, that early.
My son and his high school girlfriend dated for 3 years. They were “in love”. They talked about marriage, kids etc. Finally about 3 months before graduation my son realized they would be 12 hours apart and he wanted to have the college experience and see what else was out there. He wanted her to have the opportunity to do that to. He also realized if he wanted to be a vet he has 8 years of school. They broke up. (Ok I do miss her.) Now he already has an “amazing” new girlfriend who is pre-med. Hmmm. I’m glad neither my son nor his high school gf gave up their dreams to go to the same school.
I’m glad my wife didn’t marry the HS boyfriend she followed to college. They did stay together through undergraduate. She stayed for grad school and they broke up.
Looking back, I think that the bigger issue was her not liking being under heavy parental control. And her way of pushing back against that was to transfer OOS and to do exactly what her parents didn’t want her to do. All of her credits did not transfer over and it took her an extra semester to graduate, but she did graduate and everything worked out fine.
My main point wasn’t about the boyfriend who turned into a dope head later in life. The main point was that I can kind of see now where her parents were coming from all those years ago. Her parents established the terms & conditions and she stuck to those terms & conditions. If it was my kid who suddenly wants to transfer to an OOS state university for no solid reason communicated other than “my boyfriend is going to school there,” I don’t think that my DH & I would be opening up our checkbooks for all of that extra tuition every academic year. Not without some solid academic or other related reasons.
@juillet I agree with you – I met my ex husband at the tail end of my freshman year of college. He was a senior when I was a sophomore. I eventually married him and had 3 beautiful daughters and I agree that I spent entirely too much time worried about him, what he wanted and our relationship-- and I would have said that even before we divorced.
I know most people object to students following their boyfriend or girlfriend to college, but consider this:
At some point in life, the two people in a couple have to start following each other around. They may make sacrifices to do this. It might be necessary, for example, to move to an area where job choices in one person’s profession are limited for the benefit of the other person’s career.
Most of us have made such moves.
So we’re not objecting to people in a relationship following each other around – because we do it. What are we objecting to? Is it the age at which the decision is made? Or is it something unique about college as a stage of life? Or both?
I can’t think of a single 18 year old I know who has “grown into themselves” enough to make a semi-permanent romantic commitment. So parents who object to a kid following a romantic partner to college don’t necessarily object to the relationship at hand… more so the opportunity costs of NOT being able to become themselves either by meeting/dating other people, or just having platonic friendships with different kinds of people, or pursuing interests that the current SO doesn’t find fun or interesting. College isn’t the only time in one’s life when one can pursue all sorts of random hobbies-- but it’s certainly more convenient to try out for a campus theater production when you are 19 than it is when you are 35 and need to pay a babysitter, drive 10 miles to the theater, make sure the performance schedule doesn’t conflict with your spouses travel schedule, etc.
So parents who don’t want the “trailing BF” phenomenon usually see that the kid is not done growing, developing, spreading their wings…
For years, literally since birth, my husband and I have been drilling into our daughters psyche “Your don’t marry your high school sweatheart” or at the very least you follow your own path to college and if you are still together after your college graduation and a few years working then ok, but we would really prefer that you date a few people before making a “final decision”. Basically, don’t limit yourself . Everyone grows so much from 16 - 24, it is hard to navigate a relationship through all the changes.
They seemed to take our advice to heart…but here we are, youngest D is a HS senior and has been dating her recently graduated boyfriend (they are also each others first partner) for 1.5 year, and frankly maybe our insistence on not marrying your HS sweatheart was short sighted. I’ve watched them and their relationship mature over the past year, when it became clear that they were going to be serious, and am impressed with what I have seen and their ability to adapt and support each other. While I hope that D doesn’t limit herself, I have come to accept that if staying close to him is what she wants, it will be fine. She will bloom where she plants herself. BF stayed local for college (although not because of D, entirely, lol). D is applying to the schools she wants to attend, some are very far away, some a few hours away. BF is encouraging her to follow her dreams, but has said he sure wouldn’t be unhappy if she picked someplace closer. Who knows what will happen, but I do know that the school that was top of her list, 1300 miles away, is not looking so fantastic right now, but again who knows where her head will be in May, when push comes to shove.
Oldest D is a sophomore in college, met her current BF at orientation. They started dating in October and are still happy now almost a year later. If I were a betting woman, this is my future son-in-law.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that this is where my kids are at, because in addition to teaching them be independent, we have encouraged them to be confident in their choices.
Is following an SO to college that different than meeting and breaking up with one freshman year? I guess I operate under the assumption that if you bloom where planted, most colleges can work for most kids and that budgets further constrain students who are now limited in the amount they can borrow. I mean, can’t follow the bf if young lady can’t pay for the school?
My DD had a HS boyfriend and went to visit him many weekends (hour train ride)…she thought he was THE ONE and they broke up after freshman year… at the time she said she visited him because she didn’t have friends at college…but she didn’t have friends at college because she visited him. She regrets spending so much time away now.
We follow each other around with jobs later because we are either married or in a committed relationship…if you are married you are expecting the benefit of the other person moving for a job to benefit you too as you share the income.
People do dumb things for love (and, um, its physical expression) all the time. Sometimes they work out, sometimes they don’t. That’s true for adults and for not-quite-adults. The difference is that with not-quite-adults we think somehow we can stop them from doing it, and often we can.
I think most high school seniors have a self-protective instinct that their high school relationship is not going to be lifelong, no matter how wonderful it seems. Some don’t, though. Luckily, following a boy- or girlfriend to College B rather than going to College A is not exactly the same kind of risk as, say, going to Syria and joining ISIS with your boy- or girlfriend, or going to Jonestown Guyana. For most kids, it really doesn’t matter long term where they go to college, so things will be fine even when they break up, as the vast majority will. They will still grow a ton, they will still come into themselves as adults, they will still meet new people (unless there’s some serious abuse happening). It’s pretty much inevitable.
My kids are way, way past this point, and neither had anything like a relationship worth changing your college plans over in high school. If one had wanted to follow a partner to college, would I have tried to dissuade them? Sure, of course. Would I have gone nuclear over the issue? No.
So somehow, despite making the error of marrying the person we met when one of us was a HS senior (him) and one a College freshman (me), and then me transferring to his (great, frankly), school, and then getting married young and having kids young, we have managed to have pretty great careers (him former pediatrician, now HS teacher), me full-time college instructor with a modest writing career on the side.
Let me introduce myself to you, @blossom – one of two18-year-old’s who were “grown into themselves” enough to know whom they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with.
I followed my then bc to college. We even made the unpopular decision to get married while we were still students. We have been happily married for over 30 yrs. Our oldest ds married his childhood sweetheart while they were students. They have been happily married for over 7 yrs and have 3 precious kids. (And my dil is wonderful. I love her dearly and am so glad my ds is blessed with her in his life.)
Garland, Mom- it’s terrific your stories are so heartwarming.
Surely you both know adults who married young and whose lives didn’t turn out quite so well. I sure do. And when the children come along while the parents are still growing up-- it’s painful to watch.
I think among my close friends and work colleagues who are now divorced, virtually all of them say that they married too young (parental pressure, not quite sure about what they wanted in life but marriage seemed like a good way to “move ahead”, etc.)
I mean, I know those, and I also know others who married in their thirties and are also divorced.
All I’m saying is that there is a strain of absolutism which I see in this thread, and in other recent threads, about the "right’ way to do things, which is very prevalent on this site overall. Don’t marry young, don’t have kids young, follow a proscribed career path. I know it’s a “college” site, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a “climb the right ladder the right way” site. I know you’re not saying that, Blossom, but this site does skew to an UMC/professional career/suburban lifestyle straitjacket sometimes.
There are so many sizes and shapes of successful lives which differ from the CC norm.
This is a college site Garland as you well know. So the fact that there are lots of ways to navigate adulthood (and a successful one at that) is a given- but the focus here is typically on “optimizing” (whatever that means) the college experience. I don’t post about my cousins who don’t attend college at all- their experiences working and dating and marrying aren’t really relevant to the topic at hand. I don’t post about my neighbor who owns a successful landscaping company and likely out-earns the lawyers and doctors and corporate types in my town because he thinks that only idiots pay for college and smart kids figure out how to graduate from HS and earn a living with their hands. He’s not wrong in many ways- not every kid wants or needs a college education. But his worldview isn’t all that relevant when someone values an education for its own sake and posts here asking for advice. Especially since his own kids can now forgo college because they will inherit a family business which will keep them employed and upper middle class regardless of whether or not they ace the SAT’s.
I’m not an absolutist and there are many ways to be a happy and functioning adult. But I would have been dismayed if any of my kids had made a college decision with the intent of following a HS romantic partner at the expense of their own interests and aspirations. You and I can disagree about that and still be friends- and I can still respect the fact that you disagree with me!
