U.N.I ended cos you U.E.A: The (newly) single life of a UEA student

Don’t get me wrong, university relationships are great. Forget the awkward conversations about your other half ‘staying over’ on a weekend, the moment when your boyfriend’s mother cooks you four cheese cauliflower bake that you force down, burnt bits and all, while absorbing the palpable judgement of your a-level subject choices. No, new life, new rules.

Young love … not always quite this rosy

Having a relationship at university is rewarding, exciting, comforting and fresh. However, its also a dangerous and artificial bubble.

I have been both in and out of relationships throughout my time at UEA. I also live with two people on opposite ends of the relationship scale: a fiercely independent and (by her own admission) emotionally deadlocked traveller who has been single most of her life, and a coupled-up character who, despite having never had a relationship before university, has been happily devoted to another good friend of mine since freshers week (we are all now in our third and final year).

Needless to say then, I’m somewhere in the middle. And I don’t think I’d have it any other way. My relationships have been everything I have described, however the most important thing about them that I am learning as I begin to contemplate myself as a real functioning adult in a big and not-quite-so-concrete world, is that they taught me how to be single.

Steff Young is single… how?!

Three years at university may seem like a time of stasis, surrounded by similar individuals in a similar setting, but actually its a time of great personal change. I believe that that change can only be fully realised if a person considers themselves autonomous and free. For me, this has been accomplished by a combination of the two states, ‘single’ and ‘in a relationship’, but it is certainly in the former status that I feel most empowered, confident and receptive to whatever life throws at me.

Because it’s not ‘official’ till it’s on facebook

Don’t get me wrong, autonomy and freedom are not the antithesis of the relationship, and somewhere out there there is a man (or woman, or animal) that will nurture these feelings while also knowing exactly how many sugars I take in my morning coffee.

But this is all getting a bit heavy now. Over my remaining time at UEA, I hope to entertain, enlighten and enthrall you with my observations and experiences of a (partially) single life at UEA. From the LCR to the library, the lake to the laundrette, I will pose questions like ‘what could a single girl do with the five L’s?’, ‘can you really find love in the LCR?‘ and ‘if no-one is going to see them, is it okay not to shave your legs for a month?’.

Don’t expect this column to be clean, cos when no-one is sleeping in your bed, you don’t change the sheets very often.