High School Relationships: Cheating

I wonder why people do the things they do sometimes, and what motivates them to do it. Specifically, cheating.

I, yes, may be young. I am a teenage girl who attends high school as a junior. I have had my fair share of teenage heartbreak and realized it was never a real relationship nor was it as serious to the other person as it was to me.

I was always the girl who watched cliché romantic comedies and other teenage love dramas. I dreamed of having a relationship like the movies, and I tried too hard to jump into relationships. This is exactly what got me into picking the wrong people who looked like a good idea at the time.

So, here's my story.

I met a boy my freshmen year of high school in my algebra class. He seemed sweet, and we exchanged numbers and social media platforms. We talked, and talked, then eventually it quickly turned into flirting (which, you know, every teenage girl is lured in by flirting. AKA, me). He and I had a serious relationship that ended up lasting about three years (or at least I had thought it was a pretty serious relationship).

There had been a school dance coming up, and I was so excited to pick out the perfect dress and was all over Pinterest for hair and makeup looks. The day of the dance arrived, and we had fun. Something seemed off, though, and I can always sense when there is something shady going on. When it came to be about 10 at night, my boyfriend at the time told me he was leaving to go back home. I shook my head and gave him a disappointed smile. He hugged me and left fairly quickly.

I remembered sitting at a table when a slow song came on, smiling about how nice it would have been to share one simple slow dance with him like I saw in the movies. At that moment, it was where I was thinking about how strong my feelings for him were.

Soon after, the dance had ended and I went to my close friend's house for a sleepover. I remember us girls had ordered Chinese food and were just sitting around and having girl talk. About an hour later, my friend had received a text message from someone. She looked up at me with hesitant eyes, and looked as if she was questioning to say something to me. My friends all looked over her shoulder and at her phone, to make faces of pure disgust.

It was a picture of my boyfriend with other girls at a party.

Her friend had sent her a picture of him being too friendly with other girls, and there were other things that had happened at that party too. So, sitting there with my friends staring at me, I questioned how I should even react. Should I have been angry? Sad? Confused? The immediate reaction was to pull out my phone and call him, but my friends voted against it. They told me to see if he would confront me about it at school the following Monday.

Monday had come around, and I got to the table we usually sat at in the morning. He walked up to me, hugged me from the side, and kissed my cheek like everything was normal. Little did he know, I knew why he really left me at the dance that night.

I half smiled, and not even five minutes later someone called his name. A boy from my school looked angry when he called him over, and they were talking for about ten minutes. I didn't catch what they were saying, but my boyfriend's face looked flushed. I asked him what was wrong, and he very quickly replied with, "nothing."

I soon found out that the girl my boyfriend cheated on me with, was the girlfriend of the boy who wanted to talk to him.

You might be thinking, how could he say "nothing" and treat you like everything is okay with that thought in the back of his mind? Well, when he finally confessed to cheating on me, he blamed the alcohol.

The whole problem started with the lying. How can you lie to the person you claim to "love?" How can someone so easily lust after someone else when you were their "priority?"

I asked myself these questions constantly. Being cheated on made me feel worthless and had me questioning if I did something wrong to make him cheat on me. That's the thing people who are cheated on think about. It's sick, isn't it? The person who took your love, kindness, care, and respect for granted made YOU feel like you did something to cause this.

You're wrong.

The person who so easily valued someone else over you was wrong. They made the mistake. It took me so long to realize that for myself, but I finally did with the time of learning how to be independent, love myself, surrounding myself with people who cared about me, and just learning how to not fully rely on boyfriends or relationships to make me happy.

Who I am now is so much different than who I was when I let people manipulate me, and I was too naive for my own good.

I cannot express how many times I have believed the "I'm sorry," "It was a mistake," and my personal favorite, "It won't happen again."

I stayed with the boyfriend who cheated on me, and he ended up cheating on me three more times before we broke up. (It was him ending it over Snapchat. Classy, I know).

But, what I have learned from this experience with high school boys—and even relationships in general—is that you need to look out for yourself. Making yourself a priority is not selfish, it's ensuring your own safety when people think you are vulnerable and weak. Being self-aware, and making sure you surround yourself with people who care, and having healthy life habits will help you have a positive life.