When someone asks about my first love, I’m sure anyone that went to high school with me would be quick to state the name of the boy who I could be found with at all times during my freshman and sophomore year. While not a bad guess, it would be any of my Twitter followers from the eighth grade who would know the true answer.
Like Rae Sremmurd, I didn’t have a type. Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne or Louis Tomlinson were all more than adequate suitors for my 13-year-old self. However, I liked my men how I like my boy bands: from the United Kingdom and at least six years older than me. I loved One Direction, plain and simple. And I don’t just mean I loved their music or went to their concerts. I mean that I had a social media account that I ran from my family’s shared desktop which hit its peak at 5,000 followers. I was too cool to be a “Directioner” because that was basic. This intense subsect of the internet was very serious about “our boys” as we called them. Not only could I tell you their preferred toothbrushes, the duration of their relationships or the birthdays of their nephew (Theo Horan was born on July 16th), but I could probably give you an in-depth analysis of the different friendships within the five-some (Ziam was the strongest, I don’t want anyone to argue with me, especially if you’re a Larry shipper). And the craziest thing is, I could tell you all of those things now. Sometime in my college tenure, I would like to write a think-piece on the culture of the Internet, media and humor and how they 100 percent are a product of the One Direction Internet fandom circa 2013.
It’s been three years without One Direction. Yes, I say three years, because any true fan knows that Zayn’s departure in March of 2015 marked their end. People frequently ask: “One Direction, where are they now?” But I’d like to pose the question, where are the fans? And what do they do with all this displaced love, energy and devotion?
Some fans are currently proving the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy cannot be destroyed or created, just transferred, and they have learned Korean to become the most avid of K-pop fans. Some have used their mass following from the 1D days to just be popular social media accounts and post the cute selfies we never saw because their profiles were filled with pretty pastel photos of Liam eating ice cream. Some, like me, have abandoned those accounts quietly and joined the passionless lives of regular people, suppressing our crass and crude humor.
The vestiges of my adolescence seem to appear in many walks of my life now. Literally, I walked out of Urban Outfitters emptyhanded after almost a half an hour simply because they were playing through Harry Styles‘ Harry Styles, the best self-titled album since Beyoncé’s Beyoncé, and I was focused on nothing else but the glorious music. Even stranger: while walking down Broadway from the Columbia bookstore, I recognized a face that wasn’t a vague memory from the hundreds of faces from NSOP week. It was a girl whom I used to follow on Twitter, and I opened my mouth to blurt out her name—a name dragged from the depths of my most tucked away recollections.
As much as I hate to admit this, my love for One Direction was a prominent phase in my life, but it was just that—a phase (although I constantly argued with my mom that I was “1D af for life”). Yet, I still can’t help but get excited thinking about them. It was puppy love in the purest form. Even writing this article, I have butterflies. One of my party tricks is describing the day I snuck onto their hotel floor and was escorted out by security. The determination I felt that day could not even parallel the most caffeine-fueled study session in Butler. Whoever said that people should hold onto what makes them happy and not let it go probably isn’t aware of the multitude of ex-1D fans who walk this earth, but it is one of the most relevant pieces of advice I know.