First comes ‘love’…then comes the twitter fight, hashtags and all…then comes the the facebook official breakup.

True love and high school are two words that simply contradict each other. For some reason, each of these words said in the same sentence leaves a vile and bitter aftertaste at the tip of your tongue. Adults fall in love, not teenagers…mature people with a passion, a place in the world, and a job other than leveling up in Minecraft.

Now I know…I might seem rather pessimistic. However, the truth is, the majority of the time, high school relationships do not last. In fact, to be scientific, only two percent of new marriages in  America are comprised of “high school sweethearts.” Save your time and focus on getting into college…the truth is, just as many of your friends in high school are temporary, so are high school relationships. Teenagers spend all their time invested in their ‘relationship’ just to part ways on graduation day and go off to opposite sides of the country.

Now…you might be saying that long distance relationships do work. And while they may work for some, they definitely don’t work for two immature kids coming straight out of high school.

And besides, even if you are one of the lucky few who ends up attending the same college or are within a close proximity to your significant other, college is supposed to be a time of redefining yourself. A time to strip yourself of the identity that you may have accumulated over the 4 years and wipe your whiteboard clean. Totting around a relationship on campus only makes you stuck in the past, unwilling to lend yourself to the new experiences and the new people that college offers. To tie in the popular dating metaphor…you are simply allowing yourself to sit in a small pond with the same dull grey fish instead of getting out into the ocean with the millions of other red, white,and yellow fish that await.

One major reason that high school relationships ultimately result in demise is due to the lack of maturity. The experts say it has to do with brain development. The part of the brain that helps people make logical and rational decisions is just developing in a teen and usually it’s not fully functional until the early to mid-20s. Teenagers are simply not sophisticated and experienced enough to handle all of the hardships that come along with a relationship. They are not mature enough to stay invested in a long-term relationship. And I mean…who can blame them? If they can’t even stay invested in the same pair of shoes for a week without them going out of style, how are they going to invest themselves to a committed relationship?

High school relationships also take away from the true meaning and concept of school. School was once a place where kids joined together with the same simple goal in mind: to get an education. Now, this goal has been altered and misconstrued thanks to high school relationships. A relationship takes away from the things that are truly imperative at such a crucial and fruitful age: preserving a focused and steady education. Students should be in school to further develop academically, not to daydream about what Christmas present to buy for their significant other.

Another primary obstacle in high school dating is time. Students today routinely sprint through jam-packed daily schedules, tackling big servings of academic work plus giant heaps of extracurricular activity in a frenetic tizzy of commitments. Relationships don’t just materialize and maintain themselves, and they aren’t built on a foundation of convenience either. They require time and dedication, two things that students lack.

A relationship used to mean having an eternal best friend. Now, it means nothing more than going on a few dates with someone, “hooking up,” and then breaking up. This incessant cycle encompasses the lives of many teenagers and gives relationships a trivial notoriety. Being in love is so much more than holding hands with someone. It goes deeper than being able to say, “ I have a girlfriend or boyfriend,” and teengagers have only just scratched the surface of this perplexing concept.