Sage & Blunt: Rural Romantic

Hi! Please help!

I’m an underclassman and am trying to transfer next year to a big city college. I really regret choosing this school, and I’ve already submitted transfer applications to a couple of colleges I’m really excited about. I’ve even gotten into one with a substantial scholarship, so transferring next year is practically set in stone at this point.

Here’s my issue, though: I’m in love with one of my closest friends here. I want to tell them, but I’m terrified that confessing when I know I won’t be back next year is setting us up for failure. I’ve told my other friends that I’m trying not to get attached to anyone new, but I’m around my crush pretty much every day, and it’s starting to affect our friendship.

Is coming clean worth it when I know our relationship will completely change next year? Last semester, they told me they were in love with someone they were close with when we were super drunk. Still, I’m not sure it’s me. Help me! 

Sincerely,

Reluctantly Rural Romantic

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Dear Rural Romantic,

It’s probably you. This is apparently a controversial opinion — I consulted with some of my own closest advisors, as I always do when writing my letters; it takes a village — but why would your close friend drunkenly tell you such a thing, mysteriously declining to name the object of their secret admiration, if it weren’t you? It feels like classic hinting to me.

But even if I’m wrong, I don’t think it matters. I think you should tell them. I always think you should tell! I’ve said this before and will continue to — coming clean is typically worth it. The sting of rejection is much easier to make peace with as time passes than the uncertainty of not having acted. I think it’s a bad idea to start fresh in a new city with unfinished business in the small farming town you left behind.

Of course, there are also times when the kind or wise thing to do is hold your tongue, sit back and observe. But the fact that you’re leaving doesn’t seem to me like a good enough reason to stay silent. It strikes me more as a great excuse to lay your cards out on the table and take a big risk. After all, change is the only thing you can know, the only surety you can count on. This relationship would probably look very different by this time next year even if you were to stay put in Grinnell.

I struggle, I must say, with your use of the word “failure.” I think people can fail one another in moments, but I just don’t believe that even desires that don’t end in a reciprocal exchange, lasting connection, or whatever we dream of has to be considered a failure.

Your big move is unlikely to set you up for long-term love, but I urge you to consider that more than one possible successful outcome of your confession may exist. It’s always possible, for instance, that the two of you might embark on a passionate three-month-long affair that spans your time left at Grinnell, having finally discovered a shared love that was there all along. Would you call the experience a failure just because that love affair may have to come to a close one day?

Maybe you confess and then have really awkward sex — success! Your fantasies about what might have been can be put to bed — or really amazing sex, which would be fun and amazing despite the messiness, emotional pain or other unpleasant things that could accompany it.

Maybe none of that would happen and you would confess only to be told how much you mean to your friend, in a way that may feel devastating but is objectively probably quite beautiful.

But why wonder? If things go terribly wrong, your escape hatch is built in. You can jet off to your new home, which will be fuller with people, places and potential than Grinnell is. You will have room to spread out and recover, space for your relationship with your crush-friend to fade or transform. You’ll also be entering new terrain with the confidence that comes with having put yourself on the line and survived the consequences.

Congratulations on your acceptance and your scholarship. I’m excited for your next steps, which will almost certainly be full of places where you can see an arthouse film without driving an hour each way, late-night eateries, heterogeneity, friends, nemeses, crushes and true loves. There are reasons to be thrilled to leave Grinnell behind — but also reasons to cherish it, and I hope you can find the beauty in both.

Good luck,

Sage & Blunt