In college, everything moves extremely fast — the brisk wind borderline pummeling you on campus, your professor’s overly complicated lecture slides, and even time moves too fast when you’re about two minutes away from a midnight paper deadline.

But there is nothing, absolutely nothing in college, that moves faster than a girl after she comes to the ultimate conclusion to forget her last man, usually by means of a new one. Once she’s truly decided it’s over, come back season is officially canceled.

Right after she has cycled through the five stages of grief (which usually only takes me, on average, a day) and has finally hit the last, most beautiful stage known as acceptance, not even Big Sean could bounce back. By the time you start playing that song, we’re on to something (or someone) new. 

This method of moving on is completely different than in high school, where you obsessively crushed over the same dude for years — the one who literally refused to use folders and just shoved his loose papers deep into the abyss that was actually supposed to be his backpack. That group of men we went to school with our whole lives were all we had to work with up until graduation.

Luckily for us, that’s not the situation here at GVSU. Behind every man, good or bad, there just happens to be another one. In college, instead of focusing on the five stages of grief and healing after heartbreak, a different theory may be more appropriate. Maybe in college, the best way to get over a man really is to get under a new one. According to my research, it works way quicker.

As one who hasn’t been in a “serious” relationship in roughly five or six years, I responsibly chose to go to a few outside, updated and reliable sources. I decided to ask my newly single friends how long it took them to even consider talking to other men again after the man who they once thought to be everything, even the loves of their lives, was all of a sudden gone.

One laughed and said, “I made a Tinder the same day.” Another said, “In less than a week, I started announcing to my old boys that I was single again.”

Another one spent her newfound time and freedom searching and mulling over the football roster, and then told me, “But if I’m being honest, I really can’t wait for basketball season,” to which I replied, “Can any of us?”

Since everything else in college is moving quickly, it only makes sense that we do too. We simply just don’t have time to mourn what we thought was a loss, and my interviewees seem to be managing just fine.

So, you take your brief day of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and then you stick with the latter. Time is of the essence. There is still an entire roster to comb through, and honestly, it might take a while.