In two earlier posts I talked about struggling with relationships in high school. While this will be the final post in the series, I don’t think it will be the last I talk about this topic. Thinking about it raised more thoughts, questions and reflections I feel are important topics to write about. In the meantime, I want to finish my shortened saga and share what I took away from it.
After my friends decided to move on school was rough for me. I only came to the following conclusion recently. My friends didn’t want to hang out with me anymore because I was becoming friendly with other people. I was (eventually) grateful they pushed out of the group because I realized their friendships were a clique in disguise. I was never a girl who wanted to be in a clique. I wanted to be friendly or at the very least be comfortable with multiple groups of people. I think this made them uncomfortable.
Throughout sophomore year, I became friendlier with new people, partially by my own doing and my school’s. Thanks to the flawed tracking system for classes, when I moved up a level in math I was with a whole new group of kids for geometry and chemistry. After a few weeks I became closer with one or two people and eventually became very close friends with one guy in my class. After the whole debacle with my “friends” he was one of the few people I knew wouldn’t mind sitting with me at lunch. I sat with him and the people he hung out with in the following weeks. They ended up being the people I became good friends with by junior and senior year. They are also the only ones I am still in touch with.
He and I began dating which lasted about 18 months or so. For anyone who knows high school relationships, that is a very long time. Dating him taught me a lot of things: how to love unconditionally, how to ignore what other people say, how to know when I am not happy anymore and how to move on from what was a very painful time in my life. He was not by any means the most understood boy in my grade. Some people found him odd and a lot of people asked me why I was dating him. I learned it really didn’t matter what other people thought. All that mattered was my happiness.
In my first post I mentioned relationships in the general term. This relationship also eventually ended. Going through the relationship made me realize how important high school are. I don’t by any means think they are the only thing that matter in high school, but I do believe teenage girls can learn a lot from them. High school relationships teach girls how to learn their limits, how to deal with heartbreak, how to trust someone else and how to give a part of themselves to someone else.
I am grateful for our relationship for that. I am thankful he and I are still friendly today. The thing I learned by ending the relationship was sometimes two people are better off friends. This is a very important lesson I still take with me. I won’t lie and say there haven’t been moments that I considered if myself and guys I am very friendly with at school would be a good couple. The big question I ask myself when it comes into my head is if we are better as friends. If the answer is yes, I drop it. At this point in my life, given everything I went through in high school, my friends mean so much to me and I would not want to risk losing them. It is also an important thing to be aware of because while everyone is looking for that one special person, good friends are very valuable and sometimes hard to find.
Photo Credit: http://community.sparknotes.com/2009/12/10/a-field-guide-to-high-school-relationships-part-i
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