“We accept the love we think we deserve.” This is a quote that has always resonated within me. It is actually part of the reason I even decided to get “first love yourself” forever inked on my body. We don’t always choose who we fall in love with. Sometimes it just happens out of thin air and when you least expect it. When falling in love with someone, you don’t even realize how important it is to love yourself first.
As young people, we jump right into a relationship and it turns into an all-consuming type of love which leaves some of us dependent on our partner. What we don’t stop to think is “how will this love affect me for the rest of my life?” We grow up watching movies and television shows where the girl and the boy fall madly in love, have some sort of major fight and then rekindle their relationship to be madly in love once again. We assume this is normal. But what we don’t realize is that this is very rarely how life works out. Relationships don’t just come back together in the blink of an eye. Most of the time, the boy you thought you’d marry one day turns out to be someone you didn’t even know at all.
Some of us start out young, we get into “relationships” at the age of eleven and assume that his must be the feeling adults talk about. Wrong. Middle school relationships may seem like a huge deal at the time, but in the end those boys just end up being the ones you never speak to in high school. High school is a different story. A lot of girls step into their freshman year assuming they are going to find their “high school sweetheart” within the next four years and live happily ever after. For some people, yes, that happens, and I have so much admiration and respect for those relationships. But for the majority, we aren’t so lucky. But is that a bad thing? When you’re in high school you think that not having a boyfriend is a huge deal. In reality, high school is the time for you to start experimenting with who you are. You can be fun and bubbly. You can be shy and introverted. You can have a huge friend group or a small one. You have so many options on who you can be, but all you’re worried about is the perfect boy. You must love yourself before you can love him.
In college, it’s a whole different ball game. This is usually the time when half of your friends have found their husbands and the other half don’t even know what day it is. We step into college knowing we are one step closer to the real world; we are growing up. Along with growing up comes more serious and mature relationships, and some of us get a hard awakening of what that really means.
Let’s face it, as girls we enter college with a million things on our minds and we tend to over think every little thing. One of those things we over think is boys. Once again, finding that special someone has gotten even more real and we either run from relationships or we go searching for them. In reality, the best thing for us is to wait for someone to come along. You will always find “your person” when you are least expecting it. Sometimes, having a best guy friend can turn into something more within the blink of an eye. Or, you find a boy who come into your life full force and you realize you just don’t feel the same. But the worst is when you come into college with a boyfriend and realize he just isn’t what you want anymore, and you’ve realized you are no longer the same people you once were. College is when you begin to have a more mature outlook on life and you find out who you really are. We don’t need to spend all this time in school wondering when we’ll end up meeting someone we actually click with. Just be you, the right person will come along when you aren’t looking.