“Summer days, drifting away … To-ah, oh the summer nights … WELL-AH WELL-AH WELL-AH, HUH!”
To some, just a line from the iconic Grease opener “Summer Nights.” To the poor girls living on floor three of Amen Hall, the song they were subjected to hearing my friends scream-singing for about an hour straight on an early July night.
I met my summer boyfriend playing spikeball on the first night of my summer at a New England Prep school. On the second day, he asked for my Snapchat at the gym and we started talking — hence, my friends’ excitement that night. By the one-week mark, we were together.
And “together,” in my opinion, is the best word to describe a summer relationship. There is no need for a long “talking stage” or a complicated “situationship” to work through. No need to sneak around or send mixed-signals. Neither of you have time for that, and you both know it. There is just the two of you and only five weeks to be together.
The concept of a summer romance is anything but new. From Baby and Johnny, to Lloyd and Diane, to Donna and Sam, countless romance movies, books and more have done justice to the classic trope. Viewers will never fully know what happened to the relationships once the calendar hit September and autumn came around, but that is the point: it does not matter.
Couples spent a magical summer together, free from school, home and troubles that the real world brings. They had no distractions or drama keeping them from having fun and spending time with each other. No pressure, no expectations and no confusion. No matter what happened at the end of the movie, they made the weeks they had together count. Arguably, this is why they are some of the most iconic romances of all time.
I understand why the idea of a relationship with an expiration date can seem scary or even pointless to some. However, my outlook is pretty simple: I did not think about the expiration date at all. We both knew in the back of our minds that I would have to return to Miami and he would have to fly all the way back to Switzerland in August, but honestly? We never even discussed it.
When you know you have a limited amount of time with someone, you cannot spend the entire time thinking about how sad it will be when it is over or how difficult it would be to try long-distance — you would spend the entire relationship mourning its inevitable end before you even separate. You cannot hold yourself back from dating someone over the summer out of fear of breaking up before school either. I know if I had done that, I would have missed out on so much.
Looking back, I view it as more of a bubble, sort of a moment in time. Untouched by the reality of school and all the work, distraction and drama that comes with it, summer relationships can be the purest form of teenage love and the perfect escape from all its complications – even, and especially, if you do not end up like Sandy and Danny.
