The Amateur

Love

     Relationships in high school are the weirdest. Most teens don't take it seriously and others too much that it can become very toxic. Teens want to explore and feel this thing that adults throw into the air: love. But a teen will usually not find this love. A teen will find attraction, compassion, happiness, but never love. What's ironic is that when you are walking down the halls and you see a couple hugging or kissing you keep hearing "love ya" knowing that they say it with emptiness. So, are teens believing that what they have with their partner is love? Or are they convincing themselves it is so they can imagine that person filling up the emptiness they have, caused from society and sometimes family?
     I am currently going through this. As a teen, I read so many novels and stories of people finding this magical and unique love with their significant other and how that feeling is: too good to be true. Sometimes I do believe it's too good to be true, how can that exist when there are so many hurtful things that follow love? Since watching the Disney princess movies at the age of three to reading heart wrenching novels at the age of 17, I've created this image of love that I keep searching with desperation. I see this perfect guy with perfect qualities rescuing me from the forces that are hurting me. I combine all the qualities I read in a fiction book to one and only look for that. That's what love should look like, right?
     I certainly do not know about love, I'm too young to even know how to have a healthy relationship. But in my life the word love has been something huge for me, since I have lacked of an example at home. Don't get me wrong my mother has given me so much love and care, too much in fact. It's the stereotype society has made of having a mother and father living together, in love. See that is what I lacked, to actually see an example of what love is. All I saw was a broken mother gluing herself together so her children don't see her as a weak person, since she is the only one they could look up to. My mother had to forget about love and focus on the safety of her children, I see how lonely she gets by waking up and not having someone next to her to shower her with morning kisses. It's heartbreaking to see my mother like that and since I was little I kept telling myself "I will get the most wonderful happily ever after".
I've created a shell around myself with romance novels convincing myself that "love" will come to me like a knight in armor. I've created this imagine that is in fact too good to be true because I didn't see it in the real world, only in fantasy.
Every time I get into a relationship I expect that love I've read since I was 11, which is one of my biggest mistakes. That love is in books for a reason, to make the reader forget of the reality and see love how they wished it could be. Love in the real world is full of greatness, but also mediocrity. And yes, there are books out there that do show that, but girls like me brush it off saying "so many books say the opposite, this author just wants to see the world burn". But the problem is that the world is burning and those authors want the reader to know that.
     I refused to believe it. That can't be true. Love is this force so perfect and wonderful, how could it ever produce a tiny spark? I feel that is one of the reasons why many teens say the word love as much as they say hello. Denial is something anyone can do easily. It's also something that embraces us from the raw truth we are scared to confront.
     So maybe high school relationships aren't weird, maybe they are the shield of those who are too scared to step out and received the arrows going straight to the heart.