People always say that you tend to meet the love of your life or rather the person you’re going to marry in college. That this person will be the one that you spend the rest of your life with and the one that you go on to live happily ever after with. But what if that doesn’t happen?

Kids entering college are now faced with the idea that they’re supposed to enter college in search of that one person that is going to be in their lives forever. Instead of actually going to college to live life and earn an education as well as make memories, they are now going off to college with the mindset of “I’m going to meet my future spouse.” Not only does this ideal make people crazy, it’s incredibly outdated.

What if you don’t meet the love of your life in college? Then what happens? Is there something wrong with you? Are you not likeable enough to actually have the ability to meet that “special someone”? The answer is: there is nothing wrong with you, and there is nothing wrong with being single in college.

We’re only 18-22 years old when we are in college. That’s only four years of our lives before we enter the real world and everything begins to become serious. That means finding a job and actually figuring out what we’ll be doing with the rest of our lives, and the funny thing is, is that college is actually supposed to help us prepare for life after college. So what do you do if you spent your entire four years of college focused on finding a future husband or wife, rather than actually doing what you’re supposed to do? What if you never truly spent time figuring out who you really are?

We, as humans, have our entire lives ahead of us to fall in love and get married and begin a totally new life with another person, so why should we have this little voice in our ear that keeps telling us that this totally new life needs to begin right now? That we need to find a husband or a wife, right now? Why do we need to focus on this hypothetical other person and relationship, rather than focus on ourselves?

The truth is, it’s okay to be single in college - it’s okay to be alone. It’s also okay to be in a relationship - there’s nothing wrong with that. But the point is, there should be no actual need or pressure to be in a relationship when we have our whole life ahead of us. It’s okay to not have everything in life planned out. It’s okay if you don’t end up in some serious relationship in college- that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. And it’s also okay to not have a clue who you’re going to marry later in life. The point of college is to have fun. To have fun while we still have time.