I don’t care how hard frat boys at state schools say they go because nobody goes harder than a freshman girl who has just broken up with her long-term boyfriend.

Being from Texas, I very naively assumed that any two locations north of the Mason-Dixon line were in driving distances from each other. I did not come to college with a boyfriend, like many of my first-year peers. When I was considering distances between a previous boyfriend before I left, I did believe that we could visit each other if we ever wanted to, with just a day of driving between us, which was just completely not true. But, I still assured many of my friends that they could just “go visit on the weekends” between Maine and Pennsylvania. As I am learning now, this is not in fact true.

I am new to this game of college breakups. After watching the first round happen over Thanksgiving (the so-called “Turkey Drop”), I am only waiting for my few friends who have held out this long. But, among my friends who broke up with their old boyfriends, it was clear that they all wanted was to dump their lacrosse playing, econ majoring boyfriends in favor of a boy with long hair and rolled jeans. Such is life, I guess. 

As we approach Valentine’s Day, people in long-term relationships seem to either feel excited to celebrate their partner or kind of gross that they’ve held on this long. This advice, my young friends, is for the latter of you. Here are some suggestions on how to break up with your boyfriend if you just can’t wait until you see him next:

1. Only talk about how you didn’t get into any acapella groups this year in great detail. If you did get into an acapella group, never stop talking about acapella. He cares!
2. Send him locks of your hair in long letters. Only at the beginning of the semester, so you can let the size of the hair bunch dwindle until there’s nothing in the final letter and the relationship is over there.
3. Get short bangs, or stop shaving your armpits, or something of the sort that he begged you not to do when you got to Liberal Arts school
4. Get on Tinder Premium and change your location to wherever his college is. Wait until one of his friends matches with you and realizes that you’re his new friend’s girlfriend and tells him.
5. Spend the entire hour you have allotted to FaceTime clipping your nails in your dorm’s common room. Bonus points if people are trying to be in there too. Though it seems like you could do this in Olin too, it’s better to do in somewhere that is kind of a private space, but like, not really.
6. Just wait until Spring Break and drop him like the rest of us, asshole