Home Alone isn’t a movie that evokes the thought of Christmas for many people anymore. But it does for Junior Harden and Lindy Johnson, who have watched the movie around Christmastime every year for five years, since they started dating the summer before their senior years of high school.

“I know it’s cheesy,” Harden says. “But it’s what we do.”

A family comedy isn’t what kept Harden and Johnson together to survive the transition from high school to college. How do couples manage to stay together, with such different educational environments, people and social situations, and is it necessarily good that they did? Have the couples grown to their potential as individuals if they are still compatible with the same person they were with in high school? Or are they just ahead in the relationship game?

Harden and Johnson decided to stay together when they graduated high school. The Larned seniors attended different colleges their freshmen year and saw each other frequently when they returned home. Harden says they eventually came to the University their junior years and decided to live together because Lawrence was too much for them to handle on their own and because of money reasons.

When the couple started living together, Harden expected the transition to be simpler.

“I thought that being together for three years, I knew everything about her,” he says. “And we moved in together, and found out I knew absolutely nothing.”

Harden says he has never second-guessed keeping the relationship alive. When friends ask him about living with his high school girlfriend, he replies that he was absolutely sure it was what he wanted to do and knew his feelings wouldn’t change even when he found out more about who she really was.

Fran Totta, licensed counselor and marriage and family therapist, says couples who have been together for so long can stand back and understand how much they’ve given each other and how much they really needed and helped each other throughout their relationship.

When relationships begin at a younger age, Totta says, people grow and mature at different rates, and sometimes when people need to mature, they need to be out of a relationship to do so. She says very few couples can survive that. The ones that do, she says, started out with each person already having a strong sense of self.

When Omar Honsy met his girlfriend, Courtney Berger, he had just graduated high school and she was starting her senior year. The couple has been together for three years, and Honsy, Wichita senior, says the most significant difficulty for the couple was the need to live on their own to gain confidence without being dependent on one another. Honsy says he was glad to have someone through all the changes that went on during college.

“It helps having someone next to you to go through that with,” he says.

Honsy says that in college, the issue of independence arises more than it did in high school. In college, both he and Berger felt they needed to establish themselves as being independent.

“Being able to spend enough time with each other while still giving each other enough space to still not feel trapped—I think that was the biggest issue with transitioning,” he says.

Totta says that if a relationship is secure enough to allow individuality and space, it is more likely to last than a relationship in which a couple is entirely fused together.

“It would be rare that people can grow and change if they’re going to demand too much togetherness,” Totta says. “They have to realize that they are kind of closing in on their world.”

Kyle Reid and Chance Penner’s world actually became bigger when they discovered a larger gay population at the University than they had in their hometown of Andover. The freshmen couple has been dating for two years, and Reid and Penner agree that along with more opportunities to socialize with other gay people, more temptation is present, too.

Penner says they thought about taking a break from their relationship when they came to the University, but decided not to because it would be more comfortable to start a transition such as college with a significant other.

“We’re pretty much an old married couple. We bicker and fight, but we get past it,” Penner says.

Totta has counseled several married couples who met in high school, and she says it’s amazing when couples manage to survive after being together for so long.

“It has happened,” Totta says. “And it’s beautiful when you see it.”