School is the first real punch in the face where your peers can make you feel like trash and think that there’s something wrong with you.

Relationships form and the crushes learn to crush and just don’t work out. The true meaning of having a crush is liking someone and hoping they like you back, and if they don’t – you’re crushed. You are devastated and listen to your heartbreak anniversary playlist followed by Adele songs while eating your favorite ice cream flavor.

The time you take to get over them is when you learn to accept that you either dodged a bullet or no longer find them cute or attractive.

Eventually, you focus on school if not yourself, and find someone who is cute or just forget about crushing on someone altogether if you know what’s good for you. If you don’t know what’s good for you, you’ll find yourself having numerous crushes which are normal and absolutely fine, but the cycle has started.

The crushes you have just always seemed to be just crushes, nothing more or less. You could be thankful that some stayed that way and come to realize that you could do so much better. Because you can. Having a crush you learn to outgrow them and learn to never have a pointless crush or even like someone as close to who they were.

In other words, they just weren’t right for you. When it comes to crushes, you can be one of two people. Either a hopeless romantic or denying the fact that you have a crush. If you’re both, you’ll eventually admit it to someone while balling your eyes out. 

School dances. I’m talking about prom, homecoming, music playing, and formal wear. With the pretty lights decorated in your school’s ugly gym. You wonder the halls seeing posters and decorations. Girls are excited anticipating if they’re going to be asked to go by crushes or boyfriends.

If you have a crush, you fantasize about them asking you. True heartbreak other than them rejecting you is if they’re not going or witness them ask someone to go with them.

You decide to go for the sake of your friends going only for you to sit on the bleachers in your dress and the little makeup you have on. Clearly making an effort as you came to a school dance with no date. Most say this is sad and loser behavior, while others say they would try to make the best of it before giving up and leaving. Insecurity settles in when you think that no one could ever be interested in you, which isn’t true.

It’s hard to find something to believe in when you’re given no hope or proof, and even harder when you think this void will never be filled. The next stage of school comes and where dance moves become the new hype while cooties or the cheese touch are a thing of the past.

School is nothing like the movies, funny how we all thought we would break into song for our four years of high school. Instead, we have reality and disappointment when no one considers you as an option of a first choice or even a choice at all when it comes to dating.

College comes around and you haven’t had your firsts of anything when it comes to dating and being in relationships. Aka the late bloomer and the inexperienced. The one friend who is ashamed if not embarrassed to have no experience and has comfort in not being the only one.

Coming to Terms With It

As an adult and being in your early twenties, you try and dabble but still struggle with trying to form a romantic relationship.

The comfort found in this struggle is knowing you’re not the only one. Meeting people who want and struggle with the same things you do is blessing and relatable. Meeting people who have done what you want become your teachers and the ones who root for you on the side lines. They tell you what to look out for and the signs if you couldn’t tell what a red flag was.

Trial and error is equivalent to you living and learning, so you cry and you laugh.

I’m not saying that you’re going to be fine all the time about struggling with relationships. Who is? We’re always going to struggle with them and ask others for advice. Whether they’re toxic or good romantic or not romantic.

The thought of being with someone and denying the fact that you don’t have the thought, or see yourself getting married remains. Just not as much as you thought about it when you fantasized about Jake Ryan from “Sixteen Candles.” Viewpoints and visions we had when we were teenagers changed so do types and preferences. Maybe that was the problem.

Either the people we liked were the problem or the fact that we had high expectations and expected them from certain people who couldn’t deliver them.

The saddest of all is accepting the fact that your love life is nothing like a ’90s movie or song yet. A boombox being held on your dream boy’s shoulders sounds good right about now. Love ballads being heard.  It can happen anything could at any moment and anyone could like you even the person you least expected.

That’s a shock, but it’s a moment of flattery that washes over. If that hasn’t happened to you yet it’s a moment that is worth waiting to feel for as long as you let yourself feel it.

The beauty in liking who you do will always be up to you, and the time you spend thinking they could never do wrong until the moment they do is the moment you can choose to walk away. The lesson is given along with two choices. Learn from it or repeat it. 

In the end, there is nothing wrong with you, but in your peers and the environment in which you went to school in. There is a reason as to why we are single.

We just haven’t found it.

Most of us think it’s us that are the problem or that are scared to put ourselves out there and say hi to the boy we think is cute or simply move on to the next step in the talking stage. People fall in love in mysterious ways. Ed Sheeran sings facts.

We just haven’t found that mysterious way, let alone a person. When we do it’ll be a reminder that good things take time and are worth the wait.

Patience and growth are part of the evolution of ourselves. We just have to evolve even if we are lonely working on ourselves until someone worth that wait comes along. you know the wait would have been worth it.