Teenage love. It is the star of countless novels, movies, songs – you name it. It is an expectation set in all of us from the very first time you pick up a book, an experience everyone is seemingly supposed to have. Movies have made it so teenage romance is the norm, that high school is more about falling in love for the first time than any kind of academics. Sometimes this is true, sometimes you look around yourself at fifteen years old and all you see in your friends deep in puppy love, gaining new experiences and getting their hearts broken, all before you finish school. So, the question you constantly ask yourself is: why didn’t this happen to me? Why didn’t I experience what everyone else in the world has? Is the teenage first love portrayed in the media a lie, or is there something wrong with me?
When you are fifteen years old, everything in your life is a tragedy. When your closest friends start getting into serious relationships, it is normal to feel left behind, like they care more about their partners of two months over their best friend of years. If you complain about this, you are the lonely, annoying friend who just doesn’t get it. You’ll understand when you get into a relationship, they say. It’s teenage love, it’s supposed to be all-encompassing. So, you wait, and you wait. Maybe someone will finally be interested enough in you for you to understand. But then, three years have gone by, you are out of school, your friends are no longer in the same relationships, and you still don’t understand. You have not experienced that teenage love everyone is so obsessed with, and time is running out.
Maybe coming to university will solve your confusion, maybe all you need is to put yourself out there in a new setting, with new people. You have two years left to experience teenage love, to see what all the fuss is about. You go to parties, you kiss strangers, maybe you go home with one or two. But, it doesn’t feel right. All this catching up you are doing isn’t helping, all you are doing is making yourself uncomfortable. University starts to trickle on by, first year turning into second, second becoming third. You are now twenty years old, and have never experienced what all your friends have.
It’s getting embarrassing now. Your friends sign you up for dating apps, your mother tells you she thinks you are lonely. There is more and more pressure to have dating experience, because that is something all twenty-something year olds have. Is there something wrong with me? There must be. You know you aren’t completely hideous, as people have been attracted to you before, but your inability to hold a person’s interest speaks volumes. Am I boring? Offputting?
I will never experience teenage love. Was there something wrong with me?
Maybe you were never destined for teenage love, maybe you will fall in love in your twenties instead. Maybe you are not entirely hopeless. Maybe.
Featured Image Credit: Jonathan Marett
This article featured in the first-ever printed edition of BRAW Magazine, Close Encounters. You can read more of our Close Encounters articles here.
Braw Magazine co-editor for Stirling University’s Brig and a third year English and Journalism student.
