Content warning: Mentions of eating disorders
A lot of people feel that if they haven’t gotten into a relationship by the end of high school, they’re falling behind. It can be difficult to watch your friends and peers get into relationships while you aren’t, especially when you’re young and impressionable. I’ve even talked to friends who have felt like something is wrong with them just because they haven’t yet gotten that dating experience. In high school, dating feels like one of the most important things in the world — not just because of social pressures, but because of how high school is depicted on television. Every Disney movie from princess stories to Disney Channel Originals has elements of romance. We’ve grown up with the idea engraved in our heads that high school is the time to start our love lives.
When I tell people I had my first relationship as a sophomore in high school, they think of me as lucky. And, in some ways, I agree; I was fortunate enough to get that dating experience at a young age. However, my story is far from glamorous. That high school relationship still affects me to this day in more ways than one.
I was fifteen years old, going into my sophomore year. The beginning of the relationship felt like a fairytale; everything came together so smoothly. In today’s world of dating, we all know how difficult it can be to find a boy who gives the bare minimum, so when we started getting to know each other, he was everything. He was always the first to initiate dates and he would text me to ask about my day, every day. And when we started officially dating, he would get me such thoughtful gifts.
I put my all into that relationship, or at least what I could give for someone so young. In fact, I put so much of myself into that relationship that I ended up almost cutting off my friends for him. Granted, my friends at the time were not the best I could ask for. I don’t keep in touch with nearly any of them now. Nevertheless, they were my friends.
Instead, I spent the seven months that I dated my boyfriend solely hanging out with him and his friend group. I saw him on average three times a week, which he admitted once to me wasn’t a number that he thought was nearly enough. I agreed, since during those four days that I wasn’t with him, I did quite literally nothing else with my time. No, I’m not exaggerating.
My sophomore year of high school, the year that most people say was their easiest academically, ended up being my worst. I was already going through a rough patch since my freshman year was the COVID year, where academics were everything but normal. My attention span was terrible coming out of the pandemic, along with the sheer motivation to do my work.
I was an excellent student pre-pandemic, so my sophomore year was supposed to be my academic comeback. Instead, I let other things on my plate take over a little too much. I was struggling miserably, and it only got worse as time went on.
My lack of both friendship connections and academic prowess was never a concern for me while I was dating him. I was so head over heels that my mindset was this: “At the end of the day, even if everything goes wrong, I have my boyfriend.”
I was stuck in a land of delusions until the end of March when we were about to hit our official six-month mark. We began to have a handful of communication breakdowns. Hangouts started to be less frequent. He stopped inviting me to places with his friends, and it didn’t seem like he ever wanted to be around me. I began to push him away. We started fighting. There was one time that I was at his house and in a heated moment, he essentially told me that his friends thought I was weird. This, of course, hurt my feelings, which led the argument to spiral out of control and I ended up calling my mom to pick me up early.
We broke up two days later. The reason? He didn’t love me anymore.
If I said that this destroyed me, it would be a dramatic understatement. I remember staying in my bed, sobbing for days. My dad had to force me to go on a walk because he was so worried about me. I lost my appetite. My grandpa visited the weekend after it happened and I still stayed in my room. I recall that he went with my mom to get Wendy’s once and I didn’t even want anything, even though Wendy’s was my favorite fast food restaurant. My mom got me a vanilla Frosty anyway.
The friends that I’d pushed away didn’t know how to help me through such a difficult time. I felt like nobody was there for me, not even my own family, who couldn’t stand me talking about my heartbreak all the time. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it, so I did the only thing I knew how to do: I took to social media.
Going through my first experience of grief at such a young age led me to do things that a normal person wouldn’t do. These are things that I’m not proud of to this day, but I still give myself grace knowing how much this affected me mentally.
A few days after the breakup, one of my ex-boyfriend’s friends posted a video targeted at me, which hurt my feelings and definitely didn’t help my healing process. For the next few months, in pursuit of a “revenge arc”, I posted all of my feelings on TikTok. People at my school (who I didn’t even know that well) knew everything about my life, from my deepest emotions to my grievances with my ex’s friend group. I was bullied by his friends for months.
You could probably imagine that such a turbulent time in my life would not help me heal in the slightest. My grades got worse, I fell deeper into my eating disorder, and I felt so alone.
My grieving process took me through a range of emotions, from gaslighting myself into thinking that we’d get back together to realizing the cold, hard truth: he never loved me at all. If he had, he wouldn’t have given up so quickly and he wouldn’t have let me be treated the way I was by his friends post-breakup. I was just an experience to him.
In May, a month after the breakup, I got into my “rebound” talking stage. It lasted for around a month. From June to September, I went through three other talking stages. I didn’t like any of these boys; I liked the attention. I lived for it. All four of them were desperate attempts to feel love again, but they all ended the same way: I’d get the “ick,” which I would later realize was just an excuse for me not liking them all along.
There were plenty of talking stages after them, and they also ended the same way. They were boys who I had to convince myself that I liked, but what I really liked was the chase. I liked the thrill of finding a boy who might like me. I liked the mixed signals I’d get from all of them. I liked breaking it off, with the same excuse every time of “I’m just not ready.” I liked being a little heart crusher.
They were all experiences to me.
I realized at the end of my senior year that I actually didn’t like the person that I’d become. Deep down, I wanted so badly to love and be loved, but I wouldn’t allow myself to because of my past wounds. I became the person who hurt me the most.
When I began to confront my problems, take accountability, and make connections that brought out the best in me, I began to heal. I still haven’t been in a relationship since my sophomore year of high school, but I like to think that I’m much more emotionally available now than I was fresh out of the relationship, or even a year ago.
To this day, I still have many barriers that I have to work through that I believe derived from that relationship. I have a hard time opening up to people out of fear that they’ll leave. I never fully believe that someone actually likes me, even if they tell me that they do. Sometimes, I can’t distinguish between love and lust. It’s hard for me to imagine myself ever getting into a relationship again.
Everyone goes through some kind of relationship that inspires trauma, but I genuinely think that the reason my breakup hit me as hard as it did was because I was so young. I was 15 years old, far from my frontal lobe being developed. At the time, I thought I was so mature; I thought I knew everything, but I realize now that the reason I couldn’t handle the breakup, let alone the relationship, was because I was so young and I knew nothing. I was not emotionally mature enough to handle any of what I went through.
While dating at a young age was a good experience to have, it brought me more grief than learning experiences. I still deal with the consequences of my sophomore year relationship to this day. In a lot of ways, I feel that it has set me back in my dating life.
This is why, whenever my friends rant to me about how they want a relationship, I insist so heavily that they wait it out and that their time will come. Because a small part of me wishes that I’d waited a little longer to fall in love.
If you’ve made it this far and you’re scared you won’t find love, trust me when I say that you will. It’s best not to rush things because love is beautiful when it flourishes naturally. You might fall in love a handful of times, or you might find the one person who changes everything.
How beautiful is it that we have souls capable of experiencing such deep emotions? Life is full of setbacks and lessons, but those experiences shape who we are. I’m still healing and growing, but I have hope. There are so many people I’ve yet to meet and places I’ll go. Maybe all of these experiences, both the good and bad, are building me into someone stronger, and more emotionally ready for whatever love will look like in the future.
For now, I’ve learned that it’s okay to wait. Love will come when it’s meant to. And when it does, it will feel right — not rushed, not forced, but like something you’ve been growing toward all along.