As teenagers we are in love with the idea of being in love. But the question is, why? Why are we so determined to find our significant other at such a young age? Well first things first, we want to feel like we are important to another person. We want to feel the affection of another person. I know this because I was and still am in love with another person.

When I met him, I instantly craved his attention. I wanted to be the reason he smiled, laughed. I wanted to be the reason for his happiness. To my surprise, he felt the same way. Eventually we ended up getting into a relationship and we were happy. We were always smiling and laughing. My friends told me that I was different with him; I looked like I was happy. I had a certain light in my eyes that was only evident when I was with him or talking about him, everyone noticed.

We were always together. We walked with each other in the hallways at school, we were at each other’s house on the weekends and periodically throughout the week, and when we weren’t together we were texting or on the phone. We were in love and I haven’t ever been as happy as I was with anyone else other than him. He always made me feel better when I was upset and made sure I never went to bed angry. He would always be there if I needed him.

I spent five months of my life with a boy that I was madly in love with and I thought that maybe he was the one I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with, but things began to change. He became depressed and he didn’t smile as much as he used to. He started answering my texts less and less, he was either sleeping or doing something else. I would go over to his house and we would do the usual cuddling and watching movies, but I could tell that he wasn’t really himself. I was starting to get really concerned so I talked to his mom about it. Little did I know that his past was getting to him. When we were talking one day earlier in the relationship, I asked him about his family. He told me about his mom and his grandparents and I noticed that he never said anything about his father. “What about your dad?” I asked him. He told me that he didn’t talk about him. When I asked him why he had told me how his dad had left him and his mother when he was less than a year old. After that, I didn’t bring him up again and we only talked about it when he brought him up.

He ended the relationship two days after my seventeenth birthday and needless to say I was absolutely heartbroken. He did it while we were at school and I spent the whole day crying, occasionally leaving class to go to the bathroom so my sobs weren’t a distraction to the rest of the class. I went home and instantly went to my room, storing away the Valentine’s Day and birthday gifts he had given me. I didn’t leave my room for a whole two weeks. The weekend came and I didn’t know what to do because for five months I always spent the weekends at his house. I didn’t usually go to my friends’ house because I went to spend time with him. I realized that I couldn’t remember what I used to do before I met him, I forgot how to live without him.

Slowly, I started to not think about it as much and I started to spend my time with my friends. I was finally starting to be able to figure out how to live my life that wasn’t revolved around him anymore. I still think about him periodically, especially when I’m lying in bed trying to fall asleep and it still hurts but I am able to deal with it.

As adults, we start really looking for love for all the same reasons as we did when we were teenagers. I realized this while my mom was in her relationship with her boyfriend of three and a half years. My mom showed me what real true love was. Her and her boyfriend would fight all the time about the little things. Some things were as little as my mother going to the store without letting him know where she was. Now I know that he sounded controlling, but that wasn’t the case. He was married before he met my mother and he divorced her because his wife had cheated on him and ended up pregnant with the other man’s child. He trusted my mom to an extent but he still had some trust issues. But the most important thing to me about my mom being in a relationship was that he made her happy. Mom endured all of the fighting because she was in love. She taught me that no matter what, love always brought you back together when it was true.

We lost him to an unexpected death almost two months ago. My mother was a wreck, heartbroken to the point where she just sat at home and cried. She didn’t talk or eat. She was starting to worry me. But now she is back to work, she eats when she is hungry, but she still cries when she sees his picture which is expected. But it isn’t that which shows me how much she loved him, it’s the fact that she visits his grave twice, maybe three times a week after work and always places new flowers when the others have withered. She isn’t looking for another guy nor does she even talk about moving on. She stays in contact with his family and we always visit them when we have the extra time.

My point here is that you are going to go through heartbreak many times throughout your life. It is to be expected. You are going to endure sadness and pain. There’s no escaping it. But you can’t let the heartbreak control you. You have to keep going no matter how bad the circumstances of the heartbreak are. So if you are experiencing the pain of a heartbreak, just remember that things will get better, that it isn’t the end of the world even though it may feel like it is happening. So hold your head up high and keep moving forward. It will be okay in the end. And if it’s not okay, then it isn’t the end.