I think it’s fair to say that single girls in college are interested in finding guys they can be in relationships with. The hunt itself is a battle. It requires make-up, hours of hair-straightening and finding out the right amount of intoxication to be social, but not sloppy.

Once you find a guy you feel like you can settle down with for a while, a battle of a completely different color begins.

No two people are perfect, and I don’t even believe that two imperfect people are perfect together, like the stupid clich√É.√© suggests. Relationships are hard and unpredictable — they take an endless amount of work, patience and compromise — no matter how much love there is.

I currently have a boyfriend, as do many of my girlfriends, and in true girl style, we do have the occasional sit-down boyfriend talks: this is when we compare, brag about and sometimes bash them. Last year, I noticed that all of our talks were mostly of nauseatingly cute little stories full of bunnies and rainbows and hot sexual escapades. This year, however, I’ve been witnessing a trend … one that I’m hoping is just a phase that goes along with being in a relationship for so long.

My friends’ relationships have taken a turn for the worse just as quickly as black scary clouds tend to hover over seemingly nice Binghamton days. Little tiffs like “Why haven’t you called me today?” have turned into pretty serious fights that attack personalities and future goals.

Sometimes it seems like my friends’ relationships are making them sadder rather than happier, which makes me wonder why they stay in them at all, and how long they should spend trying to fix them. I understand that after they’ve been with their boyfriends for over a year, they have to respect their relationships enough to try to smooth out the rough patches, but I wonder how long they can do that before pulling the plug?

It takes a lot to end a relationship after a year. The person you’re with becomes such a huge part of your emotional, physical and social life — when you give up that person, you have to let go of a lot of stability. It takes a lot to muster up enough strength to stand on your own two feet.

On the other hand, who’s to say that a relationship has to be perfect all the time? The college world is stressful and fast-paced, and everyone apparently has ADD. Sometimes people throw away their relationships before giving them enough time to work on them.

Many of my friends right now are walking, no unicycling (it’s funnier), the single-relationship tightrope line, confused about what decision to make. When they come to me, I don’t know what to tell them. But I’m guessing they already know the answer. If they feel like they can save their relationships, they will … if they feel like they can’t … well, I’ll work on getting them drunk and finding them guys.