I Was in Love Once

By Chloë 

I was in love once.

Not something you’d expect to hear from a 16 year old girl, is it? It’s more the beginning of a tale told by an old man in a care home, yet here I am.

The thing is, I hate the concept of love. I hate how it is intangible, I hate those Instagram posts I can’t stop scrolling through; the endless contradictions of ‘If they love you, they make the time.’ and the following, ‘Love means knowing when to step away for a while.’

This endless stream of uncertainty eats away at me, and that’s essentially what love is. Although, it’s probably worse, because all of your words and your actions and your ideas also impact someone else. Someone you really care about. Someone you love.

So, yes, I was in love. We dated for a year and a half. He made me laugh and cry and feel every emotion in between.

Those are the facts. Those are my certainties and the rest… well, the rest is what keeps me up at night.

My relationship had more ups and downs than a wavy day out at sea; we genuinely took the whole ‘rollercoaster of emotions’ to an excessive level. It made it so confusing to realise whether or not I was happy, or if I should end things, or if we were just going through a ‘rough patch’.

Essentially, I had no clue. 

People always say that you can see how bad the relationship was once it’s over, but that’s the worst part: I still can’t tell. From where I’m sitting, I can see the good and the bad just as plainly as I could when we were together and, trust me, I saw the bad a lot more than you would expect.

Maybe I was just making excuses, giving him too many second chances, or maybe he was just really busy and I was too demanding of affection and his time. Even now, I can’t decide.

So, instead, I force myself to focus on how I felt in the bad times, relive those emotions. And I force myself to remember the good times purely as that: memories. I do not allow myself to emotionally engage with what I have ‘lost’, because this will make me want to go back to a place which wasn’t healthy. 

If you are in a relationship, have a crush, are dealing with a breakup, questioning your sexuality, or anything in between… then same. I’ve been there, I’ve seen it, I’ve passed ‘Go’ and collected my £200 and honestly, from my experience, it sucks.

Emotions suck. Feelings suck. 

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have them.

We spend so much of our time fixating on the present, and that’s okay… until it’s not. Until you cry constantly about how confused you are and how you don’t know what to do.
We are teenagers. We don’t know what to do. We make mistakes, we hurt people, we get hurt, we fall in and out of love faster than Bolt doing the 100m, and we aren’t going to stop. 

These experiences teach us how to cope when we grow up.

Because, believe it or not, we are still children. You and me. Neither of us have any idea what’s going to happen a week from now, a day, even in the next hour. We may dress up and pretend to be adults, but it’s just a fantastical desire we are aching to achieve in the hope that this transition from teen to adult will magically solve all our problems, and will magically make sense of the world around us.

Yes, I was in love once. But, you know what, in the past two months I’ve made mistakes, I’ve hurt people, I’ve been hurt, and I may have developed a crush or two along the way. And I bet you’ve probably done these things too. It’s okay. It’s okay to be confused and stressed and anxious because we all feel like that, all the time.

I hope my experiences have shed light onto just how similar we all are, considering I’m just a stranger sitting in her room wearing a dress in mid-winter and you are somebody I’ve almost definitely never met. 

And still, I’m here for you, a total stranger offering her hand to help you through whatever it is that’s getting you down. I’m here for you just like your friends are there, and your teachers and your family. 

We are all going through this together, one big group of people who have absolutely no clue what’s going on. And we are going to do amazing things, I promise.