A model: Finding love in College

Creative nonfiction writing piece

Step 1: Be cheated on. Specifically by your high school sweetheart. Blame him for everything that follows. He is now the Antichrist. When you’re drunk, you scream when you hear his name.

Step 2: Agonize and overanalyze your previous relationship. Lose sleep over it. Cry for approximately three months. At random times, bursts of irritability will occur. Confusion and loss of self-esteem are essential at this step.

Step 3: Become intrigued with a specific physical feature. When your new college friends ask why you don’t socialize more, you have the excuse, “Sorry, I just really like guys with red hair.”

Step 4: Depending on your personal views either start sleeping with multiple people at once or begin to isolate yourself in your dorm room. If you choose the latter option, make sure to have Chinese carry out on speed dial. Your roommates will try to cheer you up. You refuse.

Step 5: Your roommates become overly concern after you have a near death experience with alcohol. You have ended up in the hospital, with a DUI, or started a fist fight at the bar. Still, none of this hurt as much as the pain you feel inside.

Step 6: Go to therapy. Talk to a lady with blonde hair wearing a white blouse. Feel ashamed. Start crying. She will tell you to visit her every week on Tuesday at 1:30pm. Only go to therapy for three weeks. Decide that you’re cured of your darkness.

Step 7: Start analyzing college men. Relate them to your new ideology: “All guys are assholes and are untrustworthy.” Your roommates set up multiple online dating profiles in your name. Call them immature and insensitive towards your needs.

Step 8: Find a guy on your campus that has the physical feature from Step 3. Met him at a fraternity, a sports event, or in the library. Hook up with him. He will leave you multiple hickeyes. Baseball sized. The manager at the casual restaurant where you work demands answers. No amount of makeup can save you from this problem.

Step 9: Begin to use the Bumble, Tinder, and OkayCupid accounts from Step 7. Go on dates with random guys. Some will make you laugh, a few will make you smile, almost all of them are creepy. None of them will understand the pain you experienced.

Step 10: Stop talking about the problem from Step 1.

Step 11: Focus on your career goals after college. Work at a summer camp three states away. Realize that you have zero patience with children, and you picked the wrong major.

Step 12: Meet a nice guy that likes you for your personality. Decide he’s boring and a bad kisser.

Step 13: Sleep with the bartender that has a kid. Fantasize that you two have a lot in common. He was cheated too. But don’t worry- he will slip away. You tried too hard, and he’s too flakey.

Step 14: Sit. Analyze. Think.

Step 15: Realize that there is no logical line to follow.

Step 16: Graduate.

Step 17: Enter the adult word. Refer back to Step 15 for all aspects of your life.