High school students have forever battled the issue of swimming in the imminent dangers of love; so is fostering a relationship during such a critical time in our lives really rewarding in the end? The sole beauty of companionship is it’s bounding commitment, and in a time where we teens are establishing what to commit to, a safe and tantalizing idea of a perfect partner that will hold your hand during college apps seems rather sweet. However, the effort and time invested in pretty blue eyes that depart across the country after a matter of years for college seems rather bittersweet.

So why do we manifest energy into building and maintaining high school relationships? Other than to recreate Taylor Swift music videos or experience life through the eyes of a stranger, some teens cannot justify investing energy into something so dynamic and fragile as love. Teenage relationships, in my opinion (which I do not instill in any way to be of complete validity), are the frontiers that will help promote self discovery and understanding. As our brains convince us that there are far more important investments than high school relationships, our hearts desperately seek a timeless, lawless experience that cannot be perceivable by a mere human explanation. So perhaps that is why. We love because the feeling of love is so intimate and inexplicable that it encompasses everything that we hope to become.

As students, we look onward; as naive as adults may conceive us to be, we are actually far fetched from nativity. We simply crave a future that involves familiarity, like a partner supportively present throughout high school and into college.

However, other students at Dougherty look at high school relationships in a different way.

Nicole Chan says “high school relationships are not worth the time and effort that they require because they are more or less pointless. A relationship’s goal should be to find a partner in marriage. If that is our incentive, then why would we date in high school? The chances that you’re going to end up marrying the person you date in high school are slim.”

Kristen Chung see’s “high school as a time for excitement, but also an imperative time for focus. They [high school relationships] are not worth the investment; the short amount of joy and status it may bring is no comparison to the detrimental loss of concentration. The rearrangement of priorities that often accompany a high school relationship negatively impacts the time spent on what really matters”.

Bodhi Nguyen states, “ya’ll end up broken in the end anyway.”

However, we are taught that love is something delicate and beautiful. We are taught that love requires endurance, that it should relish in hope and consistent effort. We are taught, through romantic comedies and Nicholas Sparks novels, that we are never supposed to give up on a love that we believe in. It takes a certain level of sad clarity to come face to face with the reality that love can be tremendously unfair and chaotic. This mature realization can be labeled as pessimistic. Other’s, from this, understand why romanticists develop into realists. This development of understanding can solely justify why experiencing high school relationships can aid us in our growth and understanding in something so complicated as love.

We go through the roughest break ups on the day before our SAT’s. We fight our way past a hurricane of peers while having to walk into English with a solid face after a huge fight. We teens are the strongest, most fiercest opponents in the battle of understanding love. Some students do not believe in high school relationships. Others passionately love. I do not know which one is better, but I urge us teens to understand the significantly balanced medium that enables independence. Fitzgerald once said that “in the end we are all just humans… drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness”. However much you find this to be true, I hope you can depend on your own wise judgement to decide wether or not you should open yourself up to the idea of a high school relationship. If you choose to, reaffirm yourself that you are not walking blindly into something that surmounts to a greater commitment then you initially anticipated. If not, remember that often times high school is a fairly good time to experiment and discover. In the end, I just hope that we can all find a happy medium that insures happiness and excitement for the future that lies ahead of us.