My boyfriend and I have been dating for roughly a year and a half. We both lived in the same student building when we met, so when we started dating I naturally began spending more and more time in his room, until I had "unofficially" moved in. At the end of term when it was time to look into finding a group of people to get a house with for the following year, it just seemed natural that he and I should live together — we reasoned that if we didn't live together one of us would wind up spending the majority of our time at the other's house.

Before I met him, I was a painfully shy person, and very nervous about starting my first year of college. As a result I wasn't able to meet anyone straight away. When we started dating he helped give me the confidence to come out of my shell, and I became friends with a lot of his friends. He also played a major part in helping me get through my actual schoolwork. Recently, now a year later, I've just been feeling stifled and having mixed feelings about the relationship, and I don't think it would be happening if we hadn't started living together.

I realize that I haven't accomplished anything on my own since college began. I met all my friends through him, and I live in our current house because of him. It seems likely that I passed my first year purely because I had his help. I appreciate what he's done for me, but I want to be my own person, and I have the confidence now to do so. On the one hand, life is good, and my boyfriend is great, but on the other hand, I'm only 20 and I want to see if I can make it on my own. Should I just accept that I have a good thing going and stick with it? Or try to branch out?

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