By: Tim Donahue
The college experience at Western or anywhere else, is a transient one. Four years at university, sometimes more and sometimes less, then it’s done. Four years, and a crowd of peers dive into campus with no other choice but to trust the beginning of their young adulthood to each other.
My parents met in college at George Mason University in Virginia. They’ve been married for 29 years now and I’ve always imagined a similar fate for myself. Now, as I work through my Senior year at Western – trying to graduate while maintaining my mental and emotional health in the wake of a two-year relationship that ended in October – I find myself alone. The end is in sight, and the dream of my parent’s love story is fading before my eyes. So am I broken, or is there something about this four-year experiment that doesn’t spark the romance I’d imagined?
Love sets, or seems to set in the winter months when the doors are closed and I cannot see the mountains through the fog of my early mornings. Mornings I’d once cherished as my own are now blind, and everything done solo feels like a trap. The sky falls in the winter, everything is closer and the air turns heavy with the weight of the clouds. It gets dark at five these days, but the cold can’t be so bad when you’re sharing your body heat.
College, winter and Valentines Day, all three come to me in some kind of a combination that hits particularly close to me this year. I, Tim Donahue, love me some love. I love seeing it in others, holding hands and laughing at each other’s jokes on the street, trapped in a little world all their own making. I love love: The way the couples I’ve interviewed look at each other in a way that speaks years in a blink, sharing history in a glance and smiling at all the things that it’s bringing up inside. I love love: And still I can’t help the cold from getting to me.
I can name so many people, adults in my life, that met the loves of their lives in college– I won’t but I could. As I’m approaching my own graduation, I am starting to see my time in Bellingham as a thing of the past. Who could it have been and what opportunities did I miss along the way? How, over the course of four years, have so many people found someone to get them to stick, to decide on a single life, shared with a single person for what they conceive to be eternity?
Maybe there’s a complacency to that. Maybe in my own moments of domestic bliss, I have accepted my settling. Maybe the love that is celebrated, is actually some kind of a magnetic force pulling every one of us in towards the median. Maybe; or maybe it’s trust. Maybe it’s a commitment of time and place to someone who turns the very idea of sacrifice around on its head. It could be a compromise, but maybe there’s never been true sacrifice in love.
And maybe we’re all running our own race.
These are my thoughts and I’m writing them down.