By Hannah Wydeven

Dear Hannah,
I dated someone in high school, and we have continued dating long-distance for my first year here. We really love each other, but I am nervous that we won’t be able to stay together for another three years if we have to be so far apart. Is it stupid to stay together? Should one of us consider transfering so we can be together?
-Long-Distance and Lonely

To be completely honest with you LDL, most long-distance relationships don’t work out. However, I know of two couples who have stuck it out through thick and thin over the last four years and made it work, so it is possible. You need to ask yourself a few questions in order to determine if a long-distance relationship is right for you.

If you really love your partner and can see yourself in a relationship after college, then you should give it a chance. However, if you have any doubts about whether or not you want to be together in four years, then cut your losses and break up now. You also need to think about whether or not you can be happy in this same situation for the rest of college. I know from experience that it doesn’t get easier as time goes on, and you have to be prepared to deal with the pains and petty fights that come with distance.

If you and your partner are both happy at your respective schools, then transferring will only make you resent one another. You need to consider your own happiness and stick with a school that is going to help you grow and succeed. Also, if you transfer and end up breaking up, you’ll be at a school you didn’t choose in the first place. It’s not stupid to stay together if you think this person is your eternal love, blah blah, spouse-to-be-just don’t sacrifice your whole life right now to make it happen.

If you choose to stay in a relationship with your far-away sweetheart, here are a few tips:

Don’t get mad over nothing.
It’s really easy to take out your frustrations over distance on your lover, resulting in petty fights. If you ever catch yourself saying something like, “No, it’s your stupid cheap phone causing the static you idiot,” =]-you might want to take a step back from your relationship and figure out what is really going on.Don’t try to control each other.
You and your love live in different worlds now, where you each have different friends and activities. Get used to it. Neither of you is allowed to get mad if the other wants to do something with their friends during your scheduled phone time.

Be attentive.
You might find it easy to get on the phone and rant for an hour about how school sucks and your homework is hard, but you need to make sure you are asking your lover about their life, and listening. And because distance prevents you from hugging and kissing each other on a daily basis, you have to make the effort to do nice things for one another when you can. Send a package, flowers, a letter, a silly drawing, a picture of your naked body (at your own risk), anything that will remind them of you when you can’t be there and shows you are thinking about them.

Silence is golden.
If you ever find yourselves only talking about what you did that day, or saying ummm a lot, then you might need to take a day off. If you force yourselves to be on the phone every minute, you might run out of things to say. Don’t bore each other, just take a day without talking and you will be surprised how much it helps.

Spend time with your friends.
You’ll be miserable if you spend your whole life investing in someone who isn’t there, so spend time with some friends who are.

Be frank with yourself, and don’t commit to a long-distance relationship if you can’t put the energy into it. They can yield wonderful results with happy couples if done correctly, but can drag out and become miserable if done incorrectly. Judge for yourself LDL, which path you think your long-distance relationship is likely to go down.

Dear Hannah,
My friends always talk about people they “hooked-up” with. What exactly does it mean to “hook-up”?

-Need Help with Hook-Ups

When people use the word hook-up around me, my mind always jumps to sex – oral, vaginal or otherwise. For other people however, hooking-up can mean as little as a kiss. This confusion could be detrimental for a person’s reputation, so I think it’s important to set a definition of the term hook-up now so that in the future we will all be talking about the same thing. I posed the question “what does it mean to hook-up?” to a group of women in the locker room of The Nard, and we came up with a working definition of some important terms.

Make-Out:
To kiss someone for an extended period of time, may or may not include heavy petting over the clothes. “Bob and I totally made-out last night in the bathroom.”

Hook-Up:
Sexual contact with another person that can range from touching under the clothes to sex (oral, vaginal, anal or otherwise). Hook-up is a term indicating sexual activity without specificity. “Making-out” and “hooking-up” are by no means the same things and should not be used interchangeably. “I heard that Steve and Marcia hooked-up last night after the party even though she knew I had a crush on him!”

The only remaining issue is creating a term that means “have sex” that isn’t either “fuck”, “do it” or “have sex”. If you have a creative word that can be used in public and is code for all forms of sex, then submit it to my SPO, and I will pick the best definition for a future column. I hope that clarifies some things for you, and I encourage everyone reading this to actively use these definitions so that we can communicate a little better on this campus.