<human>: Can you give me a shortened version of the text?

I'm a little stuck in what to do in my current relationship and I was hoping for some older redditors to provide some perspective on the situation. It's easy to get tunnel vision in these things.

I've been with my boyfriend since my sophomore year of college. We were friends in high school, hung out over breaks, are now seniors in college and very close. We're both each other's first very serious relationship, though he's had more dating/sex experience than me. We go great together, I love him to death and there is nothing prompting the end of us except me heading to school 1500 miles away. We tried long distance and both think it's really miserable, and three months ago we decided to give it up at the end of this summer. 

I've been dreading but slowly coming to accept it, when last night he asks how I feel about open relationships. Honestly I don't know, I think I don't have a problem with the concept at all. I'm just not sure it's a solution to the discomfort of splitting up, which I have always seen as inevitable (I mean, we're 21).

The thing that was always the most painful to me about long-distance with him is that there isn't an end in sight. For a while it was so many semesters of college, and now it's that I'm leaving for a two-year service in the PeaceCorps in a year.  It just seems so weak to make my life plans (particularly when I'm young) around another person, but that person is very important to me. Which brings me to the questions I have for people who have had more life and relationship experience than me: at what cost do you preserve a great relationship? (Does it just seem great because I've been in so few?) Should I give up my current aspirations to be with someone I love, or am I making up that dichotomy in my head? Have any of you left someone you love to pursue another interest and really regretted it? Is being young and free (and terrified and stupid) not really all its cracked up to be?
<bot>: in a LDR and not getting any closer soon, thought relationship was coming to a mutual end but now it might continue indefinitely. Should I let it go on as an open relationship or make a clean cut?