High School Relationships are Like Stockholm Syndrome

This all branched from an audition tape about a character looking to straight up move in with his girlfriend after high school. An extreme case of course, but it got me thinking about love, and more specifically high school love, and I thought hmmm... how can I be a heartless nincompoop today?

Here's this guy's issue, his self-confidence existed entirely in this eighteen-year-old girl. That's cute and all because it takes time to love yourself, so you need a bit of a buffer between figuring things out.

The thing about high school is that nobody knows what the hell is going on. Originally I had a nasty curse word, but I self-edited it out, be proud of me. Anybody saying they had found themselves 48394030% in high school should die, because they are an emotionless robot from the future. I know that sounds pretentious, yes I see the future. I know everything, bow to me petty little human earthling babies.

That was most likely excessive.

Many philosopher's like saying that you can't learn to love another person until you learn to love yourself. I'm going to throw around names like Plato and Socrates and Confucius, so I look like I did research. High school is filled with people seeking validation and fighting for likes and follows so they can feel worthy of love. So they have all of these relationships, they hope can give them what they cannot give themselves.

The thing is, you can't really know whether or not you even love yourself until you have these external factors, shut the hell up.

Just know overtime I say hell, I've censored myself and feel so proud of me. Not because I need validation that people are proud, just because it's a fun emotion to have and I want you to experience that.

Now, I don't mean literally, because you should never be going like, "hey shut the hell up girlfriend." That's disrespectful, rude, and I will slap you through this screen you cute little prick. I'm just saying you need to eliminate the noise to hear Beyonce sing.

I say all of this because I have a lot of experience hating myself. I was very good at it for awhile, and I thought that was because I didn't have someone to love me. Yes, you have family, but you want someone that's not obligated to love you. Like yes you love me mother, but I came out of you so hating me is hating yourself, so deal with me being you.

It's so easy to trick yourself into that being the solution too, because it does work. When you get a girlfriend, and you find her so wonderful in so many ways and she wants to be with you, it's like wow maybe I'm as good as this human.

Wait until she's gone, because it only lasts as long as she's kissing your elbow. Yes, we had a weird thing about kissing elbows. No, your relationship is weird. Feelings leave and the confidence those feelings brought aren't immune.

All of that's got me real worried about all these high school sweethearts. I love love as much as the next guy, I have rom-com marathons every month. But these high school sweethearts of 10+ years got me worried.

We've established high school is made for people to begin finding themselves. And college is supposed to be where you finish finding yourself.

We've also established that you can't find yourself when your identity is in some ways defined by this other person. I mean you're not single Salkinonilko, you're Salkinonilko and Sally to everyone that knows you.

So... what if these high school sweethearts didn't love themselves and that's part of the reason they're together after all these years. It's like they hate who they are so they keep begging this non-random self-loathing person to make that a lie, which is tragic.

They've been taken captive by the insecurity of their heart and along the way decided, hey, you know this isn't so bad. I secretly don't love myself, but this person does so it's okay, I'm okay. AND NOW MY TITLE MAKES SENSE. I'm not going to specifically outright say the title, because that dear two readers is called pandering.

That's not me saying I believe all high school romances with a spark are traps of unhappiness, but I believe a lot of them could be.

I'm still young and have no idea what I'm doing, but I think it's the perspective that's interesting. Why should you worry about if you agree or not? I just think whether you're young or old, in love or still searching, life is about learning perspectives and understanding comes from realizing the intricacies and differences of the human perspective.

If that wasn't a pretentious little phrase to end on, I don't know what is.