College Advice: Give Your Heart Away

Dear Veronica,

I’m into monogamy like it’s a fetish; it seems like I’m always in a relationship. I’m bad about one-night-stands, casual sex, and dating for dating’s sake. I am about to embark on a ten-month trip to Santiago, Chile, to teach English at a university. Seeing as I’m fairly attractive, I am sure that while I am there, I will get asked on plenty of dates by men with irresistible accents who will whisper the sweet sounds of Spanish into my ear and salsa me off my feet. I just don’t know if I should date while I’m down there, knowing what I know about how I handle my love-life. Worst-case scenario, I will fall in love with some guy and I’ll have to leave when my visa expires. Should I risk being heartbroken, or should I put my heart (and my vagina) on lockdown?

- Feel like I’m still french kissing with braces

Dear French Kiss,

I can see why you’re conflicted. You’re writing from the perspective of someone who’s not in love, and from that reasonable vantage point, it seems absurd to invest yourself in someone you’ll have to leave. But I think you also understand, in glimpses, or maybe in flashes of memory, what it would be like not to feel that way, to understand those arguments and disregard them anyway –

One of the reasons it’s so difficult to talk about love is that everyone has a different idea of what it is, but we nevertheless call them all by one short, uncomprehending, easily-mocked name. The universality of that name makes it easy to forget all that love really entails, what it means. Nevertheless, we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love – vaguely, anyway – so there must be something universal about it. A suspension of cynicism, a succumbing in the heart, a bravery and a foolishness: these are the recognizable byproducts of some elusive phenomenon that is more easily witnessed than explained.

I believe that if you’re really in love, love will be its own argument, and it will easily trump all the rest. You’ll prefer to have loved this person briefly than not to have known him. You might suffer, but you won’t regret it. When we’re in love is when we most know what we want, what matters to us; when we’re in love is when we most know who we are. It might not happen for you on this trip, to be realistic; but if it does, I urge you not to shut it out.

Think about what it would mean to close yourself off the way you’re suggesting. It’s true that it would be safer, more sensible, a certain way to protect your heart; and it does bestow a kind of freedom on you when you refuse to make yourself vulnerable to others. But when you really try to live that way, you’ll begin to wonder what you’re protecting yourself for, how much that freedom is worth if you can no longer give it to someone. What kind of life you’re fighting to preserve.  The way I see it, if you can remain a giving person, one willing to be foolish, one capable of falling in love, then you’ve managed something invaluable and irreplaceable; all the rest barely matters.  The pain, the carwreck consequences, the yearning — it will all be nothing next to what you’ve gained.

- VVM

Send your questions about college life anonymously to VeronicaMittnacht@thefastertimes.com.