Whether you have been to university or not, everybody knows that there’s a culture of boozing unlike any other surrounding student life. Even the university itself knows that a large part of the university experience is about enjoying borderline inappropriate nights out, using your special student superpower of finding the most lively places in any city by scent alone to get to the best and cheapest bars and clubs.
The truth is, in your uni days, every night out is one that ends up with you face down on the nice-old-man-four-doors-down’s front step, and it’s OK because you’re not yet old enough to experience the pain that arrives like clockwork the next day. You’ll be perfectly capable of going to all the lectures you need to, with next to no consequences whatsoever. Over the course of your degree, those nights will become so familiar that once it’s over and you’re stood outside your parents house with a shiny piece of paper that is all that’s left of four years of hard work, it won’t occur to you that your days of going clubbing on a Tuesday night are over. At least not every Tuesday night. Actually, after a few Tuesdays in your favourite old haunt on student night, you’ll begin to feel physically sick thinking about it. Unfortunately, students are much less entertaining when you are no longer one of them. There are three stages to post-university nightlife recovery:
Stage One: Denial
The very first stage to hit, usually immediately after you finish. It’s characterised by your insistence upon going out any and every night you can, and drinking more alcohol than Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway put together. Whilst you’re in denial, you’ll attend as many student nights as you can blag your way into with your old student card, and spend at least half of your night wandering around aimlessly searching for the faces that you saw when you were a real student. For a short time, this works perfectly because there’s a whole host of you, all trying to extend their student-hood. For a few months, you stave off the full force of the post-university blues. Then, as one by one you accidentally stay sober enough to notice the fact that everyone around you is a veritable child, you slowly start to wean yourself off as if you’re recovering from an addiction. You suddenly realise that every one of your friends is doing something exciting and moving on with their lives, and you are stuck in the same old place.
Stage Two: Depression
Once you face up to the reality that you are no longer a student, you often have a slump. Your student superpowers have gone, and you realise that you have no idea what is or isn’t cool for young twenty-somethings in the real world to be doing because you only went to student nights. You’ll have a few bad nights with a couple of old friends, where grizzled seasoned party-goers come and talk to you like you have something in common (which you do, you just haven’t accepted that yet) and you’ll feel somewhat obligated to talk back. You’ll feel stuck between the student crowd and the young professional crowd, who still feel alien despite all the encouragement in university to think of yourself as one of them. In all likelihood, you’ll make the snap decision to reacquaint yourself with your sofa and the reality TV that you didn’t have the time for at university. The X Factor will become your new best friend.
Stage Three: Transition
Stage Three arrives with the advent of a new job. You meet new people, ones you don’t have a boozy and slightly absurd history with and you go for drinks with them. You’re integrated into a new social circle, and it’s one that you can’t ease into by drinking your body weight in alcohol and then going out in tiny hotpants and a crop top. You might not see it immediately but you, with your work appropriate clothing and your gaggle of suited and booted co workers, have become a young professional. You go to upmarket bars on days when there aren’t deals on, and you drink a few quiet drinks with co-workers. Later on, you also occasionally have wild nights where you end up in unexpected houses with unexpected people, but most of the time you are the paragon of respectability. You find you enjoy chatting over dinner and other distinctly adult activities just as much as you enjoy going on bar crawls. You don’t miss university much at all anymore.
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