Remember those days in high school when dating was just for fun?!  It was okay to date the bad boy, the one we knew a relationship would never work out with.  Or it was okay to date the girl that your mother would never approve of.  But it was high school, it’s all fun and games! It’s so much easier to be innocent, considering your parents drive you and your date to the movies or if you can drive, you have a tight curfew usually. Your parents know where you are going, who you are with and when you will be home.  If  a boy asks you out on a date, you are pretty much officially dating after that.  It usually lasts for a few months until one of you decides it’s time to play the field again. I mean, really, in high school, you only have those select few people at your high school to choose from.  You don’t know what else is out there! So you simply move on.  And there’s nothing wrong with that, probably even a healthy choice.

Now when you reach the college age, the tables turn slightly on you.  Dating becomes what you want it to be.  You can still date around those young men or women that your parents would never allow you to.  Or you can become a little more serious and start looking for that person you can imagine spending the rest of your life with.  You can even experiment with your sexuality freely without the worries of what your high school friends or parents will think.

Whatever you choose to do, it will be very different from high school.  The curfew, the parents and the rules are all out the window.  You are a free man or woman and all the responsibility of dating is in your hands.  That also means it’s up to you to make good (or bad) choices and accept the outcomes of those decisions on your own.  This is sadly when a lot of the pregnancies, bad relationships and STD’s happen…but it’s a choice that someone made and maybe in that one second, it seemed like the right choice.  We have many of those in our lives and living through them is a great learning experience.
Now when you are in college, there are many categories of which dating falls under.  See the following blog for a list of interesting categories I see most often in my college.