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Disclaimer: Please do not be offended by this post. In no way am I suggesting that you have to fall into any of the categories that are mentioned below. Everyone is different and everyone's relationships with everyone else is different depending on circumstance and personality. These are just my *very large* opinions and if they will offend you please just walk away. :)
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Another thing -- I am doing the last half of this blog post on Windows (VISTA :( ) and since I usually put in the gifs and stuff at the very end I find myself at a point where I really couldn't be bothered to wrestle with all that stuff on Windows. I might put in pictures and gifs later on, maybe. Maybe.
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This is Adelle. In case you didn't notice, this blog post is about messed up High School relationships. Not necessarily dating -- any relationship. Friendships (or what passes as them nowadays), dating (can't leave that out), student-teacher relationships (it can get pretty weird), parent-child relationships, the messed up undefinable relationships, the lot. All of these get completely and totally weird in High School.
There are very few things that don't get weird in High School, honestly. It seems that relationships take on the brunt of it -- put a few hundred socially awkward, hormonal, confused teens in a building with high and mighty figures of authority and what did you think would happen? Yeah. Exactly. It's to be expected.
That doesn't stop them from being messed up, though.
I've honestly never been one for friendship drama. I love drama drama -- I'm a bit of a drama queen -- but I don't joke around with my relationships with my friends. My friends are probably one of the most important things to me, and I couldn't stand going through things like friend break ups or the like.
Obviously, though, I can't say the same about the rest of the High School population.
I think friendship was so much easier when we were younger. A person gave you a cookie, friends for life! You didn't get into things like betrayal or backstabbing. Ah, the simple days.
Nowadays, though, you can hardly walk through the halls without someone feeling backstabbed because someone wore the same outfit.
Please.
Just because I don't participate in friendship drama, doesn't mean that the friendship drama doesn't sometimes include me. Once there was this absolutely stupid piece of gossip that said that one of my best friends emailed me in class to tell me how much I sucked.
Yeah. That happened.
*eye-roll*
You wanna know what that email was really about? My friend was teasing me about getting into the same group as my crush.
No further comments.
The conversation where I found out that there even was a rumor going around was pretty messed up too. This is pretty much how it went:
Other Girl: Hey? Are you and *insert name of friend here* done fighting?
Me: We were fighting?
Other Girl: Yeah! She sent you a really mean email right? That time in class?
Me: ...Yeaaaahhh- No.
Other Girl: ...NO?
Me: No.
Other Girl: Oh.
After that I dug a bit into the gossip universe that is my school and found out all the details. Ridiculous.
Dating is really weird in High School. Honestly, I don't really see the logic in it -- what are the chances that you'll stay together after High School? That's right. Practically nonexistent.
Even if you do, it's bound to either not last long or be a pretty dysfunctional relationship. On the rare chance that it does work out and manages to be a healthy relationship then... well.. we've already stated that it's a rare chance.
When people are in High School they aren't really their own people yet. They haven't gone through enough of life to really shape themselves or who they will be. They haven't gone to university or had a job -- they aren't themselves yet. For this reason I don't believe that High School relationships will last. The person you're dating simply isn't who they were meant to be.
There are a couple of different types of High School dating relationships. I'm not saying I'm going to list them all, because that would be impossible -- every relationship is different based on the people in it. But I have a couple I guess.
There's the overly-casual relationships. These are the people that get into relationships but aren't, really. Those who don't show affection or anything then after a couple of weeks (or days) of not-dating, they silently go their own ways. There's honestly no point. They might as well not be dating.
There's the 'true luuurve' relationships. The title is pretty self-explanatory. These people are the ones that are convinced that they have found 'the one' for them. They show excessive amounts of PDA (public displays of affection, duh) and regularly disgust their surrounding peers. They have bright, happy ideas of their future together and how many kids they will have (well, maybe not that far). They are obsessed with each other, but their overly attached relationship usually ends in tears. Especially if only one of the members is a 'true luuurve' person and the other is overly-causal. Those never end well.
There's the 'in the moment' relationships. These relationships are made as a spur of the moment thing, fueled by passion and lust. They usually start for one thing only *conspicuous wink*. They can either end with both parties sated and accepting or in a gigantic explosion of a fight, with a vengeful partner. These are never good news and are the typical 'irresponsible teenager' relationship that most people refer to when complaining about the new generation and how much they suck.
Relationships can also be half-half, which I touched on under the 'true luurve' heading. When people don't communicate they can have different views on what the relationship means and what they respectively want to get out of them.
I'm not saying that it's impossible for High School relationships to be healthy and break off on even terms with both parties accepting the consequences after an acceptable amount of time of compatible relationship filled with open communication-- no, wait. Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.
Of course, I'm not exactly an expert. But feel free to quote me if you want to overlook the disclaimer. I've always wanted to be quoted. You have to keep in mind that I, too, am a High School-er. That's why I'm saying this like some condescending Spock Prime that's seen the future -- I understand the limitations of the extremely immature and underdeveloped mind of a teenager because I am one.
Yes, I am aware that that means all this applies to me too. Honestly, it probably does.
The only difference is I'm willing to look at myself and my peers in the face and admit that Wow. We are all idiots.
I'm just a realist, honestly.
Teachers are supposed to be these people that lead us and guide us and well... teach us as we grow. But are they really all that great? I already have a post about this so for this in a bit more detail I'll forward you to my other post, Teachers: Should They Really Be Teaching?. As you can probably tell this is a bit of a sensitive subject for me. And ironically I want to be a teacher. Imagine how that would go down.
Anyway. Relationships between teachers and students can also get a bit messed up in High School. Not all of it is bad. Some of the developments are good, and teachers can really help a student come into themselves. If the teacher is a good teacher, the student can actually bond with them and this can become a beneficial relationship based on support and understanding. This can only develop, however, once the student is mature enough, which usually only occurs in High School. So there's one positive development in relationships in High School. Go figure.
But, of course, there's two sides to every coin. Or something like that. I don't even know if that applies here...
But anyway, obviously there are some bad developments or this wouldn't even make it into the blog post. It is called messed up high school relationships, after all.
One of the things that gets weird in High School is if the student becomes more invested into the relationship with the teacher than the teacher is. Not in a romantic way -- we'll talk about that aspect later. I mean if the student starts seeing the teacher as a friend when the teacher is more interested in their salary than the student. It can come as a rude awakening and the teacher will probably end up saying something like 'I'm your teacher, not your friend'.
I completely disagree with this, by the way. I believe that a teacher should be able to see themselves both as a teacher and a friend, a caretaker, a guide to the student. That's what children need -- someone who actively cares about them, not someone that only cares about passing them so they get paid more.
Anyway. So that situation can be awkward and make the rest of that relationship actively Messed Up.
Another thing that gets weird -- or just ugh- just yuck, really -- is teacher-crushes. Let's dedicate a moment to a little shudder of disgust here. 3.. 2... 1... *shudder* Yuck.
I'm not saying that teacher-crushes only come into existence in High School -- no, that little piece of disgusting-ness has unfortunately been around for quite some time. But it is in High School when it has the possibility to develop into something a little less... innocent.
Godthistopicgrossesmeout.
Maybe we should just leave this here. Yup, yeah, I'm gonna leave this here.
Okay so next in line to get weird and messed up is Parent-Kid relationships. We've all heard of teenagers getting rebellious and stuff, becoming the bane of their parent's existence, arguing and debating and being stubborn. There's a whole lot of scientific study about why this happens -- brain development, hormones, some psychological stuff that I really don't want to get into -- but honestly I think the answer can be summed up pretty efficiently.
We don't like to be told to do shit.
You can go as deep into the meaning of it or all the whys but at the end we just want to make our own decisions. Obviously this crashes with our parent's inherent need to take all the decisions out of our hands. Parents want to protect their children and part of that is making the decisions that they think are right for their children. As teenagers, we are growing into our own opinions and those don't necessarily align with our parent's opinions.
At other times they do align with our parents opinions and we get into a fight because -- darn it -- we don't want them to be right.
This, I have major personal experience in. I don't know if it differs from parent to parent (which it probably does) but there's something in me that just makes me want to fight back with anything and everything my parents say. I don't know why -- maybe it's a pride thing, or the condescending I'm-older-and-always-right look that gets directed my way afterwards -- but I just can't loose to them.
I'm gonna say that this is what a lot of teenagers feel, for the sake of the validity of this blog post.
One of the major thing that I find causes fights between me and my parents are moral debates. We, as teenagers, are part of a generation that I believe is much more open to things like sexual orientation and mental disability, things like that. My parents aren't so open. So I usually get in arguments defending people or debating human rights or something like that.
But I don't think that's what all teens get into with their parents, so I'll just stop there.
Something else that develops in High School is the introduction of the seriously-no-one-knows-whats-happening relationship. These relationships cannot really fit into any other category -- not sure if it's a friendship, or a romance or an... acquaintance. They might like each other one day, hate each other the next, have to be forced to be together, or be surrounded in a thick cloud of UST.
These are just... well.. I can't really say much about them. They're just kind of confusing. Depending on the side they wake up on or the state of the weather the two people can act completely differently.
You can't expect to get on with everyone, obviously. But with these relationships it's like their conflicted with their perception of the other person. Like-don't like-love-hate. They all get thrown in there somewhere.
Honestly there's two people like this in my grade. They like each other, then they don't, then they're in love, then their archenemies. All this is enough to give a girl whiplash.
Boris (Redcap) and I have actually deliberated on their relationship and the ups and downs of it. We've decided that there is actually a pattern to this madness. They seem to stick to a state of mind in one-week stages, switching up to a different state the next week. The state peaks and wanes through out the week. This is pretty regular unless there is a trigger event that causes the states to switch faster or more slowly.
That is our hypothesis. It is still yet to be proven but we plan on graphing their interactions and hopefully coming up with a full overview of their relationship.
Soon.
So anyway. I think... that's the end of the blog post.
Christ, it's long.
I hope this didn't bore you to death, and if it did, well... you're dead. I can't exactly apologize now, can I?
Cya in the next post (or, you know... not)
