All the couples you’ll ever meet at Exeter Uni

Couples – some of us are in them, some of us want to be and some of us have to duck down side streets to avoid a particularly overly enthusiastic teenage one about to run us down mid tonsil tennis.

Prepare yourself for every type of them you’ll meet in Exeter.

The sports couple

Everyone knows them, whether they want to or not – they strut around campus in their matching His and Hers stash and gym stuff, Nike or New Balance trainers scuffed to perfection to maintain the perfect amount of edge (how do they accomplish this? They must have been new at one point and yet they manage never to get caught with overly shiny, lame trainers. Sorcery.)

He’ll be a rugby or football player, she’ll be a netballer or a cheerleader. You’ll seem them at every Monday Moz (or Monday Rosie’s now? I hate it already and I haven’t even been) and every Wednesday TP, suitably decked out in whatever bizarre theme they’ve forced upon their social. Because, obviously, they’re both social secs.

He’ll study Sports Science or Business and she’ll do Law or English. They both seem to be absolutely smashed every night to maintain their BNOC status and yet their grades never seem to slip and you just know they’re both going to get firsts. Even though you go out three times a week and are struggling to maintain a shaky 2.1.

In the day though, you’ll mostly likely see them at the gym, preening and taking couple selfies with hashtags of #gymbuddy, #gains and #coupleswholifttogetherstaytogether. He’ll spend more time looking in the mirror and fussing with his hair and she’ll have applied new make up twice in an hour long gym sesh.

They’ll go for dates at Hubbox and the Old Firehouse but actually spend the whole time talking to all the mates they see there; dangers of being a BNOC. They’ll have met at a wild pres or a joint social, inevitably drawn to each other by their amount of mutual friends and their general need to be with someone as hot as they think they are.

They’ll last tops a year; they’re both too beautiful and too selfish to stick to just one person; who knows how many other BNOCs there are in the world for them to sleep with?

Of course, this couple can take many forms. One day, you’ll see them as the footballer and the WAG, the next they’ll be the hockey player and the lacrosse player. It doesn’t matter – everyone loves to hate them.

The weird Francophile couple

You’ve seen them – you remember walking through a cloud of their shared smoke when drunk and angrily slurring about the dangers of second hand smoking while your own cigarette fell out of your slack fingers and burnt your leg. They managed to look disdainfully down at you even while sitting on the edge of the pavement together.

They are literally inseparable, so much so that people have started referring to them as an amalgamation of their two names. Think “Shamy” of Sheldon and Amy out of The Big Bang Theory. They live in each other’s pockets and just pick clothes out of the shared pile of each other’s French brand clothes that no one else has ever heard of that lives at the end of their bed.

They hang out on the steps outside the Forum, chainsmoking Gauloises and talking to each about how meaningless the human existence is and quoting Satre. Probably. I wouldn’t know, I failed GCSE French. They’ll have met in their first Philosophy seminar, talking over each other in their cool, throaty accents about the Problem of Evil (in my opinion, crocs).

You’ll never catch a glimpse of them in any club, except a mythical sighting once in Cavern and yet they always exude the air of being slightly hungover, bored and aloof. You secretly wish you could look as stylish and model like when you’re hungover, instead of resembling a slightly deflated beach ball.

They’ll only ever deign to be seen in independent coffee shops and indie vegan cafes, drinking black coffee. Black like their soul.

This is a couple that will either stay together forever, mutually glorying in their shared distaste of anyone exuberant or excitable or break up in one of those fiery, passionate arguments their flatmates say they’re always having.

The flatmate couple

There’s always one – even amidst the cries of “Never shit where you eat!” and “We’re like brothers and sisters!”, there are always the two that can’t resist their drunken longing and sleep with each other even though they’re flatmates. This is bad enough in itself, you think – they’ll be months of awkwardness and they’ll both get jealous when they bring other people back etc. But it’ll pass, they’ll get over it and we can get back to umpiring the Chunder Chart.

But then the worst happens; they’re going on a date. It’s just a quiet drink, they say shyly, it’s not  a big deal.

Famous last words.

Fast forward a few months and she now wears nothing but his old leavers hoodies and sports jumpers and he hasn’t set foot in his own room since Freshers’ Week. Your weekly flat jokily named Netflix and Chill sessions have now turned into actual Netflix and Chill, while they canoodle giggling under a blanket and you sit frozen with the kind of abject horror that otherwise only ever occurs when a sex scene unexpectedly comes on when watching a film with your parents.

They now no longer go out except for Saturday Lemmy and only because everyone manages to reach new realms of battered, knowing the club is only a metre away and they can slip off to bed without anyone noticing. On the rare nights the flat does manage to haul them out, they spend the whole time with their arms draped around each other as if some opportunistic fresher might snatch their partner away if they dare to let go. They stay for ten minutes, po-faced with Jagerbomb abandoned (a sin) and then announce they’re going home.

They’ll stay together for as long as it takes the charm of readily available sex to wear off, break up and leave everyone else to stew in their awkwardness for the rest of the year.

The couple from home

High school sweethearts, they decided they couldn’t bear to be apart for a whole three years and applied for the same university.

Within a week, they’ll have told everyone that they got each other promise rings when they were 14 and they’ve been wearing them ever since. You give a rictus smile as the girl gabbles about how the stars have obviously aligned, shows you how her promise ring has their initials inside it (while you secretly say the Lord of the Rings phrase in your head; “One ring to rule them all..”)  and they were so lucky to have found each other so young while you wonder how many shots you would have to do to drop dead on the spot.

They’ll have colour-coordinated stationary and spend hours in the library, in the pretense of study yet managing to make out the whole time. Still doesn’t stop you envying their enormous supply of study snacks.

They dress so preppily, it’s almost unbearable – you can just imagine them ironing each other’s perfectly folded Jack Wills shirts and dresses, coordinating their colours for their next day. It almost helps, as whenever you’re hungover and forgot to put contact lenses in, their similarly coloured blobs serve as a warning sign for you to duck into the library.

They’re at every single Cheesy Tuesday’s, singing their hearts out to each other and attempting to reenact the Dirty Dancing lift. With disastrous consequences, obviously – you vaguely remember holding her hand in one of those weird drunk moments where you love people you usually hate while her sobbing partner ran for ice for her split lip.

They’ll last a mere two months into first year, until one of them accidentally kisses a course mate while drunk; this launches an almost cataclysmic release of three years worth of pent up sexual energy from the pair of them.

You are secretly glad, as even though you had a very soggy shoulder after providing support to the poor heart-broken girl, she blossoms into a beautiful, alcoholic Babe-ish butterfly, batting boys away like Margot Robbie after Suicide Squad. 

The musical theatre couple

What I like to call the Double Threat, these two are always easily recognisable in their matching hoodies advertising whatever production they’re involved in just now, backpacks adorned with badges featuring slogans such as “The show must go on.”, “The sun’s a ball of butter.” and “Lights, camera, action!”.

They’ll obviously take some form of performing arts, such as Drama or Dance; you’ll scorn their choice of “fake subject” and glory in your scholarly pursuits. Yet you also can’t help but notice that they actually always seem to be busy and working twice as hard as you are.

They’ll most likely be spotted in the Forum, forcing tickets to their next show on every Dom, Dick and Harry or sprinting from their last rehearsal to their next, not helped by the abundance of vertical hills in Exeter.

You can instantly know where they are anywhere on campus as you’ll hear them spontaneously break out in Suddenly Seymour or You’re The One That I Want, or a sudden shriek as they terrify passersby with their sudden dance lifts.

They’re surprisingly good fun on a night out as they’re so busy the rest of the time, when they actually manage to get some time out, they let LOOSE. You’ll never forget the time they cleared the dance floor in Arena (Sorry, Unit One) with their rendition of Breaking Free with choreographed dance moves at Cheesy Tuesday’s.

These guys will stay together forever and you’re actually happy about it; what a wedding that will be. Soaring, flying, literally.

The long distance couple

Oh god, why? It’s the only thing you can think as your new flatmate shyly explains that their other half goes to Durham (inexcusable in itself) but they just couldn’t face breaking up. “We’re just going to see how it goes.” They say, hope still shining in their fresher eyes.

Fast forward a few months and those same eyes are now ringed with black from so many late night Skype calls, Facetimes, phone calls, texting seshes, Whatsapp chats and Snapchats.

They spend their entire life tethered to their phone or computer lest their partner think that in the brief ten minutes they haven’t spoken, the other has slept with someone else.

They spend their entire life on the train up North or going to the station to pick their girlfriend or boyfriend up; as neither of them ever has any money because of their ridiculous expenditure on train travel (not even a railcard can save them), all they do is stay in and no doubt get rid of many months of sexual frustration that you valiantly try not to hear through the paper-thin walls of your halls.

Nights out are out of the question; the one time you managed to drag them out, they spent the entire time maintaining an equal distance from any “temptations” and didn’t drink a single thing because they didn’t want the night to get “out of hand”.

This poor couple will stumble on until one of them is actually forced to break up with the other as they have to choose between the train to their beloved or actually eating for the week.