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How Losing The Guy Of My Dreams Taught Me To Have Bigger Dreams

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I was just like any other lost freshman puppy. I drunkenly roamed around my college town every weekend and wore less than my father would ever like to know about. By the time second semester came around, I felt I had learned the ropes of where to party and how to handle my alcohol. That’s when he walked stumbled into my life.

Tall, dark, and handsome doesn’t even begin to cover it. He had the body of a Greek god, shaggy brown hair, and beautiful brown eyes that lit up when he looked at me. He was a two-sport athlete, held a position on student government, and had a solid a 4.0 in the honors program. Beyond all that, he was a trust fund baby with his own summer house complete with a boat and parents who owned half of his hometown. He met every qualification I could ever have for a guy, not to mention he actually wanted to hang out with me during the day, which was new territory for me. He took me to dinners and dates to the movies. Before I knew it, I was hooked.

As my sophomore year started, we had spent the whole summer in contact while he studied abroad and held an internship two states away. We became more serious as soon as school started. We were spending every waking moment together and I basically lived in his house with him and his five roommates. I was a cheerleader and he was football player — pretty much as picture perfect as it gets. We would go grocery shopping together, I helped him study for his accounting entrance exams. He’d buy me dinner and bring it to work for me, I took care of him while he had the flu (or just got too drunk). We picked out items for his house together, and he told me that he planned on proposing to me, that when we were married I’d never have to work a day in my life as long as I kept my perfect ass.

Basically, we were the couple everyone hates. But this was just how it looked on the outside.

We might’ve looked picture perfect on the outside, but our relationship was seriously flawed. Anything I held an opinion on was a joke to him, he didn’t take my career goals seriously, he never bothered to learn what I was interested in, and he was too narcissistic to ever take my ideas into account. Aside from those issues, I just straight up couldn’t trust him. He would lock his phone and change the code every week or so. He would still message his ex and still had pictures (nudes) of her on his computer. He’d visit his “friends” at a neighboring school but end up with the ex and stay in her sorority house.

This all put a lot of strain on the relationship and always ended in a fight that was somehow my fault and my problem. He never took responsibility for his actions and believed he could do no wrong to me or anyone around him. He believed he was the golden boy of our whole fucking campus.

The final straw was Bid Day last year. He posted an all too romantic picture with his high school sweetheart at a football game from the night before. Of all fucking days of the year: Bid Day. The biggest freaking day in the world of a sorority girl, the day my blood is supposed to be made of glitter and rainbows. Instead, my heart felt like it was being ripped out of my chest one artery at a time.

Fast forward two years. They are happily still dating, but happily is a loose term because he still attempts to hook up with me every few weeks. It still hurts to know that what I thought was something so beautiful and perfect literally ended like the “Blank Space” music video. But in retrospect, that’s the best part.

I graduated from college this past December with dual degrees and was offered a full-time position halfway through my last semester. I plan to start grad school in the fall at one of the top schools in the nation for my program. I am living the fucking life. He may have had this awesome plan for how our lives could have gone if I let him continue to walk all over me but that was not how I wanted things to go. Maybe he was the man of my dreams, but I now know sometimes you need to dream a little bigger than some hot guy with a boat and golden retrievers. Sometimes you need to dream of being your own damn boss and owning your own company with no help from some D3 football bench-warmer.

This featured image is a stock photo from our database. The people photographed are not in any way associated with the story.

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