The Life of a Teenager

Your average teenager is flesh, bone, blood and hormones. Nothing more, nothing less. Sure, there may be opinions in the mix, or intelligence, or maybe a proclivity towards thrash metal and French indie films, but at the end of the day, we're those four elements, and the latter dictates our lives. We’re irrational creatures, slaves to their whim. Creatures who like to declare undying love or live in miniature soap operas every day of their inexperienced lives.

For me, that means falling hopelessly, head-over-heels in lust with all sorts of unsuitable men – well, boys, I suppose - and this is my story.

PM – 14th February to mid-July 2003
PM was my first crush, back in the tender last year of primary school; I think it started on Valentine’s Day, so I was 10 at the time. My reasoning? He was nice, he was Deputy Head Boy, and most importantly of all, our birthdays were on consecutive days: therefore, we must have been soulmates. I made him a card for his birthday, I tried to be on Prefect Duty with him so we could have some ‘alone time’ (God only knows what that, or indeed any of it, meant at that age), and finally I made the mistake of telling my so-called friends that I had a crush on him. Naturally, he knew within ten minutes of me telling them; chasing these ‘friends’ and shouting “Don’t tell him!” at the top of my (by this time) 11-year-old lungs didn’t exactly help matters.
Of course, he was horrified. Why wouldn’t he be? I was a fat child, the only one still wearing a skirt and cardigan and knee-high socks at this point, and a semi-outcast because I didn’t watch Eastenders. And worst of all, I was a pretentious know-it-all; proven by tests to be the cleverest pupil in the year group, out of ninety students, and it wasn’t just my invincibility in English or Maths (ha! Not a skill that followed me to secondary school...). I read the Atlas every night and knew of every country, its capital and flag; I read Horrible History books every day, and I was generally a bookish child. Nerd.
After he began to ignore me, and refused to sign my leaver’s book in July, my ‘love’ turned sour; he stole a book from me, I chased him, attacked him viciously over the head. That would teach him to not like me back. My teacher, who had an inkling of my innocent desires, made us team captains on the last day of primary school in a valedictory game of rounders. We won by half a point – he cried. I laughed.
Still, it didn’t stop me from crying on the way home because I never thought I’d see him again. Ironically, seven years later I found myself hanging out with his friends in a club, grinding him for a laugh, horrifying him again – and more ironically still, he crashed my 18th birthday party.
Oh, how things change.

BW – 25th September 2004 to February 2007
If PM was my first proper crush, then BW was my first true obsession; it took half an hour of him beating me on the go-karts at my youth group’s away weekend and ten minutes of football (soccer) banter for me to be completely consumed by him, his nice boy persona, his Crystal Palace FC love and, most importantly, his giant ears. My obsession lasted for two-and-a-half years, never wavering despite the two offers I had in the meantime (one was a ginger racist boy called JT who was two years younger than me and threatened to kill me if I didn’t date him – something which my dad sorted out and ensured that I never saw him again, something I didn’t exactly regret – and my best friend EF’s crush OH, who I couldn’t date for obvious hos-before-bros reasons).
He knew within a day, at which point I realised that it was a bad idea to confide in fair-weather friends. But he was still nice to me. Unfortunately, that just exacerbated the problem. After he left the youth group, I found myself changing my route home to stalk his bus (I had serious issues, but in my defence, my mother stalked my father which contributed indirectly to them getting together and getting married). And what bus-mates he had.
His younger brother, SW, was the most obnoxious creature to walk the earth; BK wasn’t much better. They called me names, horrible names, were misogynistic bastards to me, told BW he could do much better. It often made me cry when they called me fat; but what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, so I came back with witty retorts, much to their bewilderment. At first he walked with me – to this day I’m still not sure if he had a miniature, reciprocal flame for me – but after they threatened to punch him if he did so again, he stopped getting the bus. After a year of pining and my other best friend, EB, dumping me (obsessing about BW was apparently a contributing factor to this), I got over it. About time too.
I later stumbled across his Bebo page, which was “pimped” and professed a love of chav music... two wasted years of my life. I went straight out and dated a boy, OG, I didn’t like for three weeks, which included a birthday present, a song he wrote for me (“You’re fitter than Dame Kelly Holmes, but in a different way”) and a dumping by text (he got there before me). I swore off crushes at that point, at least until...

RB – 7th October 2007 to April 2008
Incidentally, the time that my love – it was as close to love as an unrequited love can get – lasted mirrors exactly the timespan of my depression that I had during this point, and I’d certainly accuse him of being the straw that broke the camel’s back. I met RB backstage at a play in a private school near mine; the friend I’d auditioned with had gone AWOL, the other friend involved was dating and smooching one of his friends, and the majority of the boys there were chauvinist snobs. Except for a few; among them, RB.
His Scottish accent was virtually orgasmic. He was fun – no, he was funny. Relatively cute, and a nice boy – and he was rich. It took me four days to be intoxicated by everything about him. It took me one more day to have my heart shattered. He had a girlfriend, you see. A year younger, at my school. I was devastated.
At that point in time, I kept a Hello Kitty diary with a small logo of her in the corner of every page. The page detailing that particular day has an emotastic rope around her neck, tears, slits on her wrists. Everything went downhill in my life after that – school, mood, friends; in hindsight, it was coming anyway, but at that point it was all heartbreak. I’d watch Bridget Jones and eat ice cream and cry and listen to Awful by Hole. The proximity of being so close backstage, the naked exposure of acting, my relative alienation from most of the cast had all culminated in feeling underwater whenever I was around him.
He knew I liked him. His girlfriend knew I liked him. Halfway through my paranoia/heartbreak/depression I discovered she’d said some cruel things about me that could only have been gleaned from him. We argued, me and him, and haven’t spoken since.
It’s all in the past, of course; but remembering it, I still feel a dull ache. He stands near me at the football because we both support the same team. We have stood next to each other, behind each other, squashed into the stand together for nearly a year. And still no exchanges have taken place.
Astonishingly, the next heartbreak that threw me as hard was his best friend from primary school. What is this? Why do we live in such a small world?

JR – 13th November 2008 to 6th June 2009, or maybe 16th June, or maybe 4th July
Of all the unrequited loves, this is the most vivid. Partly because it’s the most recent, perhaps because he’s the only one who never disappeared from my life for long enough for me to deal with it. I believe it’s a mix of the two.
We met on 30th September, because – by a coincidence – I’d just become Editor of the non-existent school magazine, and walking up to school with my best friend SL, she introduced me to him, the Editor of his school magazine. Within a few months he was helping me with my magazine, showing me how to edit articles and praising me. It was always going to be a matter of time.
And we both liked Britpop! And we both wanted to be journalists! And we were both obsessed with football! It was like we were soulmates, except for one or two factors; he fancied TH, a girl I’d been friends with a few years before, and wouldn’t date non-Christians. I was crushed. Thinking he and TH would become a couple at a Valentine’s Day party, I rolled the die desperately; over Instant Messaging, I told him bluntly that I liked him, and he was shocked, I think. Having rejected me but established that he wanted to be friends, we smoothly progressed to discussing the new Chelsea manager.
Eventually I gave up. What was the point? He was besotted with TH, told her he loved her – to which she laughed – and I was getting nowhere. So I began to get over him. My friends supported me. Except...
So much for being friends. “Jen doesn’t fancy you anymore,” JW told him. “Oh, well, that’s a blessing in disguise. Oh wait, it’s just a blessing,” he replied. Callous bastard. Over him or not, it was infuriating and humiliating. I forced an apology out of him eventually, at a party whilst stargazing in the children’s park there, and having apologised, he immediately asked out a friend of his. It was a High Fidelity situation; as soon as someone becomes involved with someone else before you do, you become much more angry. You feel like you should’ve moved on first. They broke up after five days, but I wasn’t to know that. The summer was spent brooding over him.
What I didn’t know then, of course, was that I would have the last laugh. He’d never kissed, I’d never kissed... but I got there first, and have always had a shameful sense of pride about it.

TW – December 2008/April/July/August/September 2009 to July 2010 and counting

And finally we reach the anomaly. The mutual crush. Except it wasn’t, at first.
We met at a party where I’d hoped to cop off with JR; I didn’t, and ended up meeting TW, and dancing with him. Everything was very saucy. Muttering small talk and him clutching my hips – I’d never really been that close to a BOY before. And we’d have made out if it wasn’t for my prevailing adoration of JR, who was still present at the time. We got each others’ phone numbers and I left. The bouncers wouldn’t let him accompany me outside to the car, where my irate mother berated me for being half an hour later than promised. Like I cared.
I was astonished that he’d hit on me of all people. I didn’t realise that he’d just been dumped by JW, who would later become a friend of mine (we bitched about TW together). I also didn’t realise that he sent incredibly cheesy, flirty texts; one sent to me at Christmas time began with “Hey babe”. This reduced him from a potential boyfriend to an object of mocking. Oh, if only I’d known...
So I flirted outrageously with him over the months, occasionally nearly reciprocating his out of control crush. We met up and nearly made out under a tree, although I chickened out in the most embarrassing manner possible. From some intense gazing into each others’ eyes, I turned my head left and saw some ants on the tree.
“Look, ants!” I exclaimed, to his astonishment.
“I love how you see the beauty in living things!” he replied. (Yes, really.) Once more, he was just a figure of fun; I escaped on the pretence of needing to go home early, and as he walked me towards the car park, to my chagrin he attempted to hold my hand. Afraid that JR would by chance walk past us at that moment and get the wrong idea, I let my hand go slack and shoved it into my pocket. I never realised that TW had noticed that until later.
And then, after the fall-out with JR, I went to China on a school trip for two weeks where we encountered swine flu. After a deep, meaningful conversation with IB, who was a year older than me, I began to consider him in another way. Sure, he acted like a player and was corny, but he was also fun to talk to and flirt with, and he was a nice guy; most importantly of all, he adored me, and I enjoyed the attention. So I began to have fluctuations of romantic feelings that never became concrete until – once more – we nearly connected again at a party. I spent the next two weeks becoming more and more certain that I had a crush on him; in a moment of madness, I rang him and left an incriminating voicemail to say that I fancied him. It took a day and a half for him to email me after that, and all he said was “Cheers for the voicemail”; it was my little brother’s birthday, I had visited a potential university, and my nerves were shredded indefinitely.
A week prior to this, I’d stated that I’d date any man who gave me a Yorkie. On the Monday I saw him on the way to school, and he gave me a video case; I presumed this was to do with a video of himself when he was younger that he’d confessed to. Telling my friends about everything – the same ones who had convinced me to make the voicemail – I showed them the case. I opened the case. I screamed.
There wasn’t a video in there... there was a Yorkie. Two days later, we were in a relationship and have been ever since.
It was wonderful, at the beginning; making out in front of a still virginal-mouthed JR was a particular highlight, as was the entirety of the first date. And no matter how much things go up or down with us, it’s proof that eventually there’s someone for everyone. All my efforts over the years have made me stronger.
Do I love TW? No. I don’t think we’re mature enough yet to appreciate stuff like that. That doesn’t mean we don’t like each other, it just means we’re realistic about our prospects. That’s the beauty of teen relationships – they’re really just for fun.

Thus ends my story. It may not be as emotionally ravaging as others, but it’s one which is probably more realistic of the majority of teenagers.