What You Don't Realize You Will Miss at College

College is the best time in a lot of people’s lives—they meet lifelong friends, fall in love, and are forced to read Nietzsche. It really is worth the hype. For those of you about to pack up and head off to college, though, it’s good to realize there are things about home that you are going to miss far more than you expected. Obviously, you will miss your friends and your dog, but here are three things from home you don’t know you are going to miss. A lot.

Being well-fed
Forget friends! This is what you will miss the most about home—eating good food. Even if you aren't crazy about the tuna casseroles your parents make, most home-cooked meals (or home pizza delivery meals) are about five times tastier than dorm food.

What is dorm food? It resembles real life food to the naked eye, but its plastic taste and foul smell give it away. “Hey, I managed to survive cafeteria food,” you might point out. That’s true, but imagine eating cafeteria food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Be afraid.

Living with someone who listens to your problems
One thing you learn after a few weeks in college is to appreciate your parents for taking you and your problems seriously. Parents will always listen to you complain about life. You can talk about your insane load of homework or the guy/girl who won’t text you back, and they listen. Even if they criticize you, they always bother to respond.

Your college friends can’t be depended on to offer that 24/7 counseling, because they deal with the same problems as you. If you start complaining about how hard your professor grades, they’re more likely to talk about how hard their professor grades than offer you sympathy.

Parents, on the other hand, listen to everything you say and tend to agree with you because how could YOU be wrong? Enjoy it while you can.

Privacy
In high school I didn’t think my privacy could be any more compromised. Someone would bust in through my closed door every half hour to tell me to clean something, ask where the car keys were (yes, I am hiding them and plan on stealing the car), or just say hi.

Then I went to college and there wasn’t even a door to barge through. You and your roommate will sit two feet from each other in a room the size of your bathroom for about a year. And if you’re extremely unlucky, s/he will have a bf/gf attached at the hip and they will make out two feet away from you for about six months (before arguing two feet away from you for three months, then breaking up).

What do you think you're going to miss the most about home? What are you looking forward to getting away from? Is anyone going to argue that high school caf food is actually amazing?