My boyfriend is talking about graduate school out of state, and I’m already enrolled at the California school he attends. I chose it partly because I thought we were finally done with long distance. Now I’m trying to work out whether we had the same future in mind.
I’m 22, he’s 21, and we’ve been together for two and a half years. We started dating during my sophomore year of college, while I was studying outside California. We did the distance then. After graduating, I moved home to be close to my family and to him. Being in the same place mattered to me; I didn’t want our relationship to keep happening between visits.
He had always talked about staying here for his master’s after he graduated. When I chose my own graduate school, that was part of the picture. The program was better, too. I wasn’t picking a course I didn’t want just to follow my boyfriend. But I did choose with both my education and our relationship in mind. I wanted us to start building something together.
My commitment here is longer than the degree alone. There’s a two-year program, followed by an induction program into my career field, making three years altogether. When I enrolled, those years felt like time we could spend in the same place. They feel different when I imagine him leaving before I’m through.
First came the possibility of a summer internship in the Midwest. I support that. It could be a wonderful opportunity for his career, and a summer away isn’t what’s upsetting me. It’s the possibility that he would follow it with graduate school outside California. What sounded like a temporary stretch apart could become another long-distance chapter, with no clear date for us to be together again.
I brought up applying to the school we both attend. He thinks he wouldn’t get in and says it isn’t worth trying. I find that frustrating. I can accept that an application might end in a rejection; I have a harder time understanding why it shouldn’t happen at all. To me, applying would at least leave the possibility open. It wouldn’t require him to turn down every other opportunity.
Still, I know the internship and the other graduate program could be excellent for him. That’s what makes this difficult to say without sounding as though I’m against his future. I’m excited about what he could do. I’m also hurt that I weighed our relationship in a decision that now feels much more like mine alone. I don’t know whether he understood how much staying together shaped my choice.
If he goes, I could leave out my induction program and try to find something wherever he ends up. That would mean changing my own career plans to stay with him. Or I could finish what I’ve started here and try long distance again, hoping one of us could eventually move. Neither possibility is settled, and I don’t yet know what either would look like in practice.
The conversation itself worries me. If I explain how frustrated I feel, I’m afraid he might stay because of me and resent it later. I want him to understand why this hurts. I don’t want his decision to become something he feels I made for him.
