~N'Spire You~

Teenage “Love” Affair

(For our teens or anyone who has a teen or desires to impact our teen community)

I fell in love for the first time when I was 15.  He was perfect and everything my little heart could ever ask for: tall, handsome, slightly older, athletic and most importantly extremely popular.  After being on this earth for 15 whole years, how could a girl NOT know what she wanted?  I was at the peak of my teenage life!  I knew everything, except for myself, but that wasn’t so important because I had the rest of my life to figure out who I was.  At that time, a boyfriend was exactly what my young and impressionable 15 year old self needed…or so I thought.

I was prepared.  The countless romantic movies that I watched coupled with the Usher songs that I filled my head with, equipped me for this journey I was about to embark on.  At such a young age, I had no idea what it meant to be in a relationship, I just knew that all my peers were in them, the movies I watched made “teenage love” look really cool and my favorite singers were singing about it, so naturally I gravitated to what was popular.  At the time, I didn’t understand the impact that this would end up having on my life; I was opening the door to a world that required much more maturity than I had mustered up at the age of 15. So, when things didn’t work out, one can only imagine the devastation.  It was pretty much the end of the world as I knew it.   

When the walks home from school ended and I no longer saw him at my basketball games and there were no more matching shoes or “I love you” CD’s with Maxwell songs and no more kissing and snuggling…when all those things ended, I was depressed and had no clue how I was going to move forward in life…AT 15!  My focus on school diminished, I didn’t care about basketball like I once did, and everything was off balance.  I was dealing with extremely intense feelings with an adolescent mind and heart.  Prematurely, before I even knew how to love myself, I got into this teen-lationship and became exposed to emotions that I didn’t know how to process at such a young age.

We start early with relationships not knowing that we’re throwing our maturation process off kilter and making ourselves grow up faster than we need to.  There is this glamorized sensation around teenage love but the reality is that there are a lot of “grown up” consequences that go along with these relationships.  How does a young teen deal with depression due to a breakup or the lifelong impact of having a child too early or the emotional and mental impact of aborting a child?  These are situations that result from young teens “falling in love.”    

We have plenty of time to experience relationships but our youth only comes around once.   Enjoy your youth, discover you, focus on your education and just say no to teen-lationships!  :)  

Help preserve the youthfulness of our teens…they’re growing up way too fast!

With Love

Tenisha Michelle