"Of Love and Teens: A guide to the Chaotic World of Teen Relationships"

By Jocelyn Thomas

Standing inside an art museum looking at this really decorative rug, I look up and recognize something; it was the frames inside of frames. Going over to inspect I found that all the frames, Frames 1,2,3, came from something called the Reeves Collection. When I look at these frames I see a tunnel; I fall deep into the tunnel. This reminds me of the process of looking deep into yourself.

The teenage years can be so hard because that is the time you really begin to explore who you are. It’s hard to find yourself and harder to look, but life is the journey of finding out about you. This is truly hard for we teens, we must fight hormones, and people are prejudice. Parents don’t want us to become our own people, and society shuns our every move. Hormones, or the enemy, as I like to call them, confuse us and multiply our emotions ten times. All these demons that seek us out during our journey are the cause of the depression that most of us hold in our teen lives. Unfortunately, too many of us can’t sort ourselves out and find pain and death the only salvation. We have to work at being who everyone else wants us to be, all the while hearing that we are sheep for doing so. Its especially hard to discover yourself when you have to live with and interact with others to do so.

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Black and white photo of two little girls, their faces slightly blurred. They aren’t overly beautiful in the cute bunny sense, but something about the makes me love this photograph; it’s Nanni and Kitty by Gerard Richter. Though the two girls don’t look related, they make me think of sisters. Essentially all teens have problems with their families. There might be some out there that have perfect family lives; however, I have never met one and strongly think they are pure fiction. There is nothing wrong with having problems with your family. No one can go through life without disagreeing with at least one person; it’s how we deal with our problems that we must change. We as teenagers want to strike out on our own, yet we always must rely on our parents. Who do we have driving us to school, who gives us money for what we want? Its strange that we rebellious teens are always relying on our parents. A selected few teens strike out, who have a choice growing up. Of course we shun and laugh at them, but inside we wonder how they can.

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I didn’t come across that many teens at the airport, without adults that is. I saw a boy walk by he was escorting this elderly woman down the hall. They seemed to be carrying on a very deep conversation. The woman was stooped, and I think very tired, never the less the chatter they raised seemed somewhat lively. This reminds me of watching my older sister and my grandmother together. They sit and talk and joke around.

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Most kids I know get along better with their grandparents than their parents. Grandparents are huggers and uplifting family members; they aren’t overbearing like parents. To grandparents we can tell stories and cry to when needed. Though maybe it’s not fair that we see things this way. Our parents come off as bad people next our grandparents, but that’s because our grandparents don’t have to stay up late when we break curfew and then ground us. They don’t have to sit up worrying at night whether they are doing a good job of raising us, at least not as much as our parents do. We don’t like our parents because they do things that seem wrong to us, but sometimes it’s what needs to be done. Don’t think that I am an advocate for everything that any parent does, parents are people too and can be wrong. Grandparents have a lot of good qualities and are some of the best people to a confused teenager. These days adults seem to want to stick our heritage off in little nursing homes and pretend as if they don’t exist. We can’t do that; the elderly are one of our few true links to the past. We, as children that care about where we came from, need them.

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Walking through the Heard Natural Science Museum I saw this the shadow was of a couple standing out side on a veranda holding hands, away from prying eyes. This "shadow" makes me think of colliding relationships, like when your parents don’t like your boyfriend. It’s hard being caught between two relationships. Each side wants you to assure them that they mean the most to you. You have to agree with everything they say, or they’ll think you’ve turned on them. You feel like a traitor whenever you are with one side, and you are constantly having to sneak around, not telling either side when you are with "the enemy". To be with either becomes a struggle, because you can’t talk about the other side, no matter how important they are to you. You wind up retreating into yourself and don’t really participate in either relationship.

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Pyramus and Thisbe grew up together and over the years fell in love. Forbidden to marry each other Pyramus and Thisbe, the two young lovers, tired of speaking only through cracks in the walls, decide to meet at the Tomb of Ninus, under some white mulberry bushes. Thisbe goes to the mulberry and sees a lioness feasting, fearing for her life, she runs away. Leaving behind a shawl, which Pyramus finds on the ground covered in blood. Pyramus sees the lion and, thinking that his love had been devoured, kills himself. Thisbe returns to the bushes to find Pyramus dead and kills herself as well. The blood of these two lovers, stains the white mulberry, which because of the gods pity, are forever after purple, a symbol of the lovers’ fate. The poet Ovid recounts this Babylonian fable that was recounted in The Metamorphoses. The two lovers were forced to take sides and died for choosing love.

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In the sixth grade I remember discovering couples, not that I had never seen any before, but this was when I discovered them amongst my own. It was strange to me, I didn’t think that we were really mature enough to actually be in love. I being the naïve child that I was, I constantly sought out boys to have crushes on so that I would fit in. After long drawn out search I found I didn’t really like any one guy enough to have a crush on him, let alone date him.

Talking to my friends about guys was extremely hard, especially since most of my crushes were completely faked, and the fact that my friends believed that I was really ‘in love’ with my friend, Edward. No one believed that we could possibly have a totally platonic friendship. We couldn’t like each other because at that point liking involved drawing hearts around our conjoined names, and we didn’t do that. We were in denial of our true feelings, the fact that he admitted to a crush on someone else didn’t mean a thing.

When in the seventh grade I took my focus off of being like everyone else, and realized how sad those kids that had been dating. They were just trying to be older, more mature; they didn’t have real feelings for each other. Its actually kind of sad we teenagers spend so much time making ourselves up in hopes of catching someone’s attention, and rarely do we really ever care for that person. Everyone is in a hurry to grow up. At my school the kids who go together, really means talking to your prospective honey on the phone or walking them to class or being designated party dates. Real feelings, except for physical attraction, rarely have anything to do with their relationships. This is one of the many reasons I don’t date; too afraid the guy going out with me just because he wants to go with someone rather than go out with me. I can say, however that I do know of one couple that truly had feelings for each other.

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Love is a strong affection for another, arising from kinship or personal ties or sexual ties or admiration. This is Webster’s definition of love. An American psychologist, G. Stanley Hall described adolescence as a period of emotional stress resulting in rapid and extensive physiological changes. Both of these definitions are broad but together they help to define a teen relationship.

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When you begin your teen years everything seems difficult, your upper class men think you too young to be of any use, and you suddenly see yourself as too old for half the things you once enjoyed. That’s when the problems start. Your perception of how you should interact with the people surrounding you changes. Watching Saturday morning cartoons is no longer acceptable girls must start wearing makeup and guys have to like sports of some kind of course, you must have some kind of romantic relationship. You want to stay out later, do things for yourself. You want to have cool friends and a nice boyfriend. Suddenly your old relationships are not a good enough; you want change.

The basic teen relationship with anyone, is chaos, ever changing. It’s how we get along with those around us. And how we get along is really an outward reflection of the turmoil inside of us. When we are good inside then we have at least ‘normal’ interactions. But when we feel bad it shows in how we deal with others.

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Its narrow minded to think that love can not bestowed upon those of us younger than the legal drinking age. Until we have reached eighteen, we can not possibly be in love, not the real kind and anyone you fall in love with before twenty-one is just a fling. Trust me I am an advocate that love, as most teens see it, needs to be redefined; but to say that we are incapable of love is wrong. The problem with society is that everyone generalizes too much. One girl makes the mistake of sex before true love and we are all harlots that must be kept chained to our houses, away from evil males. Just because the generations before us ran to the altar when they were young doesn’t mean that we will too. I happen to believe in true love. While I don’t believe that most people have ever had the chance to experience it, I do believe that it is out there. I do not, however, believe that marriage, long ones included, equals true love. That is why it angers me that people chastise teens for seeking something we so rightly deserve. Even though not all of us go about our searches in the best ways.

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In my experience most people have better relationships with each other than with themselves. Teens, depicted by the media and unfortunately, in real life, are continually selling themselves out. We wear the exact same clothes, the fads and fashions of youth, talk the same way, and watch the same movies. While having things in common in with your friends isn’t bad, you shouldn’t be someone’s clone. In a romantic relationship you sometimes lose your identity. The reason that people have such one sided relationships is because we become too afraid of who we are with out the other. People don’t like parts of themselves and to make up for it, they enter some meaningless coupling. You can’t erase the things you don’t like about yourself that way, you have to work through them or at least figure out why you dislike them so much.

People are not always forthcoming about their true natures; we all put up fronts. Fronts that we hope will make others like us more. I Can’t say that I don’t enjoy being able to pretend that my friends are all angels for short periods of time. Of course, sooner or later you have to realize it’s just a front, but at least our masks get along. In a society with ‘polite conversation’ and ‘diplomacy’ its hard to really know people, but extremely easy to like them. In our relationships with ourselves we can hide nothing from ourselves, and the reality of what we see is frightening and upsetting. With others, the rough spots are smoothed over because they are hidden, and it’s a lot easier to get along.

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I was in one of the many magazine stores that the airport holds, looking at the magazines labeled for teens. I hated half the magazines housed there. Its infuriating that in the media we are portrayed either as obsessed boy band fans or sex crazed. I have yet to understand society’s view on us. Do we act too young or too old? When we have close family ties, we are children and need to grow up more and when we try to do things for ourselves, we are growing up to fast and need to slow down. How can we become adults when half the world wants us to stay innocent children? In this madness we seek fellowship with our peers. Sometimes this fellowship turns to love, and then suddenly we are considered sex-crazed. As I understand it we must be youthful forty-year olds that are all single and virtuous, but looking. How in the world are we supposed to do that? We teens are already in turmoil within ourselves and our age group, pushing all of these expectations does not help to clarify things. Society can’t agree on an ideal teenager and force us to become thus; therefore they need to let us explore ourselves and live.