As graduation day hits, one can’t help but to look around and see all those faces of fellow graduates that may or may not have played an influential role in your growth as a person. Throughout the sea of faces, a few stick out. Whether it be your best friends, that guy who you always partnered with in calculus, girls that were never really nice, most likely it is…your first serious boyfriend.
High school fosters a lot of different and extreme emotions, one of them being love. You’ve seen that guy with braces and awful haircuts and you’ve seen him at his prime during his senior year. Acknowledging that you’ve both been through a lot both mentally and physically, it only makes that connection between you two that much stronger. Memories from your last days of junior high are some of your favorites, and nothing makes you happier than when Friday night hits, the lights are shining on the field and you make eye contact with each other while you’re wearing his jersey.
All of those feelings that you both are developing are so raw and new. Those movie dates and late night drives make you feel like there’s nothing better. Meeting up at each other’s lockers after class and walking through the halls together seems like the epitome of romance. You two love each other and become inseparable, and in those moments you feel as if what you two have is a “forever thing”, but in reality, you don’t.
There comes a time when high school has to draw to a close. The stress of picking colleges and trying to manage distance with your own individual happiness only contributes to that time bomb that is your relationship. You both know it’s coming and there may be tons of bumps in the road that only seem to get bigger. The break-up is impossible to avoid, it’s just a matter of when and where.
A broken heart is not what you want to spend your time tending to during your last few weeks of summer. But trust me, those piles of tear drenched tissues decrease in size and that song on the radio becomes less and less painful as the days go by. Even though your feelings towards your now “ex” may be a bit tainted right now, there are some things you need to thank him and the break up for.
- Grades contribute a lot to your already high stress level. Thanks to your boyfriend, there was always someone there to console you after a bad test, or to give the old “oh, a C isn’t THAT bad”.
- After all the drama that takes place throughout the halls of your high school, it was comforting to know that you had someone in your corner at all times, someone rooting for you when it all got just a little too much.
- Lessons taught around the kitchen from your boyfriend’s mom are some of the most valuable ones you’ve learned.
- Not only do you learn about yourself, how you love and who you are, you learn valuable lessons on communication and compromise.
Trying to see the positive out of such an agonizing time in your life such as your first real break up can be hard to do. But when all is said and done, chances are that he’s feeling the same way and you owe each other a lot. So when you do find yourself looking at your soon to be graduating class and you two do end up locking eyes, smile, because this is the final time you’ll be in the same place with the important part of your past as you’re about to step into your future.