Break up with your boyfriend or girlfriend now
For me business school represented a fresh start. I was moving across the country, leaving friends, family and my job. It was a chance to wipe the slate clean and remake myself into a smarter, better person. There was nothing holding me back from being anything I wanted to be. Nothing, that is, except for the hundred-pound barbell shackled to my ankle by a thick chain leading all the way back to the Midwest. On the other end of it was the Boyfriend.
The Boyfriend and I had met three years earlier. We dated, fell in love and we were happy. We even decided to apply to bschool together--he coached me through the quant section of the GMAT and I edited his essays. We were the perfect team. Then due to extenuating circumstances he found out he needed to wait a year to apply to bschool. We were confidant we could handle it. It was only a year, after all.
The day I left for NYC we said a tearful goodbye, telling each other that a year would fly by and that we would soon be together again. Four months later we broke up and he mailed everything I’d left behind at his apartment to my parents.
What went wrong?
Two weeks after arriving at bschool I met a second year who wanted to go out with me. He was rich, handsome, Italian, and impossibly arrogant. I told him I had a boyfriend. "Ah, I see," he said. "Ok no problem. I will get your phone number now and I will call you next semester." No, I told him, I still planned to have my boyfriend next semester. In fact, he would be moving to New York the following year to be with me and we were planning to live happily ever after. Then Italy explained the Rule to me. The Rule states that if you start bschool in a relationship there is a 90% you will have broken up by the end of the first semester. Long distance relationships are most susceptible to the Rule but it applies across the boards with few exceptions. Being married improves your odds but not by much. I assured Italy that I planned to beat the system. He smirked.
In the beginning the Boyfriend and I talked every day, several times. Bschool was more intense than I had bargained for and he was my lifeline, pumping me back up when the world got me down Classes were intense, group projects even more so, and on top of school the job recruiting process took every spare minute of my time. I rarely slept, lived on Power Bars and coffee and devoted all my time to keeping my head above water in my classes and in recruiting. The Boyfriend, on the other hand, still had his whole world. The difference was that while I felt I desperately needed him to lean on, he missed me but didn't need me. Bschool is a grueling and formative experience. It’s impossible for anyone on the outside to understand what you are living day-to-day, much less why you have no time left for them or why you are stressed to the point of a nervous breakdown. Not the ideal scenario for a lasting relationship. By the time first semester wrapped up we called it quits, him telling me I was no longer the same person and me trying to prove that deep down I hadn’t changed. But of course I had, and that was the whole point of going to bschool in the first place.
