High school relationships are one of the most beautiful moments of our school lives. Such romantic relationship happens between school students, either in the same classrooms or between different schools.
High school relationships are often the first feeling of love in an individual that they remember throughout their life. In some cases, the experience of first high school love is toxic but generally, individuals remember such a relationship as a matter of pleasure.
Despite having such beautiful and romantic moments in school days, most of the relationships fall apart with time due to various factors. Let’s dive into the world of high school relationships and try to find out their characteristics and reasons why such relationship often fails to deliver expectations.
Characteristics of High School Relationships:
Several distinctive characteristics make a high school relationship different from other kinds of relationships that we experience in the later stages of our lives.
Exploratory:
High school relationships are often exploratory by nature as they serve as a platform for the adolescent to express their love, feelings, and romantic desires. Students often use their first relationship to understand themselves and their preference for love.
Emotional:
High school relationships often experience a roller coaster of emotions such as infatuation, excitement, and one-sided love, and sometimes even it results in intense heartbreak. The intensity and seriousness are too high in such a relationship because of the newness and sanctity of the relationship.
Learning Opportunity:
High school relationships often provide a great learning opportunity for individuals such as how to develop communication and relationship skills, how to compromise, and how to solve conflicts with maturity, etc. Individuals often learn how to address and fix issues such as jealousy, insecurity, and trust issues in a relationship.
Transient Nature:
High school romances are transient and live for a short period to a few years. In this period, individuals still try to discover themselves and understand what attracts them the most. When the conditions aren’t fulfilled, the adolescent couple often fight over small issues and break up due to lack of maturity.
Parental influence:
Parental influence is one of the most significant characteristics of high school relationships as parents play a vital role in making decisions about an individual’s life.
Parents often interfere with various subjects in student’s life such as studying, extracurricular activities, and even friendship or relationships.
In case, if parents feel any relationship or friendship is not right for us, they often inform us about that and sometimes also force us to get rid of the relationship or friendship.
Longlasting Impact:
High school relationships might be short-lived but their impacts are long-lasting in teenager’s lives, social, and emotional developments. Positive experience leads to faster personal growth and resilience while bad experiences in relationships result in trauma, self-doubt, and pessimism.
Why do most of the high school relationships fail?
Only 2% of high school couples end up marrying each other. Let’s discuss what are the factors that affect high school relationships that result in decline.
1. Immaturity:
Teenagers are not emotionally or psychologically well-developed at that age, so their understanding and needs are limited or too much. It often creates obstacles in immature relationships.
Due to their immaturity, high school students often have impulsive behavior, misunderstand partners and lack conflict resolution skills. These issues hinder students from expressing their feelings and thoughts effectively. As a result, misunderstanding and disagreement emerge which results in separation.
2. Changing Priorities:
Due to immaturity, adolescent’s priority towards life and relationship changes very rapidly and it is very difficult for partners to cope with it. What they prioritize today in a relationship, there is a very high chance that priority won’t be the same after a few months.
As the students focus on their studies, careers, and extracurricular activities in the later stages of high school, their priority may shift from relationships. Most couple’s aspirations, ideology, and schedules don’t align in most cases and they drift apart.
3. Lack of Communication:
However, effective communication is very important to keep any relationship alive. However, during school days, most of the students lack the necessary communication skills that help them to express their needs, feelings, or anxiety properly. Also, teenagers often don’t have their personal mobile phones or privacy which creates a barrier to communication.
Without having proper skills of communications, students fail to express their desires, wishes, and expressions, leading to misunderstanding and unresolved issues.
Additionally, through social media, it is not possible to express yourself always despite the young generation nowadays totally relying on social media for communication with their partner.
4. Social Pressure:
High school relationships are often influenced by societal norms and peer pressure. Teenagers often have to deal with many social norms and pressure as a burden that they need to fulfill without a choice. It leads to a dilemma about their relationship status and ethical conduct.
In school days, adolescents need to conform to numerous numbers of peer pressures such as maintaining a certain social status, having a stylish partner, or displaying their relationship status on social media.
Constant scrutiny from peer groups, criticism, and fear of judgment sometimes force young students to step down from their relationship and find a better-suited partner who will be appreciated by everyone in their friend circle.
5. Insecurity and Jealousy:
Due to insecurity, teenagers often have to struggle with insecurity and jealousy in their relationships that their friends fuel. Putting certain limitations on partners and lack of trust create a negative emotion and tension between them. It ultimately results in eroding and breaking down a healthy relationship.
Jealousy often arises from insecurity as one can be very possessive about his partner’s feelings, behavior, and communication with others such as classmates. The possessive partner often tries to create a master-slave relationship and control the other’s actions which results in misunderstanding, trust issues, and conflict.
6. Lack of Experience:
High school relationships are most of the time the first romantic relationship in an individual’s life. Without having previous romantic experience, individuals often commit mistakes in relationships and fail to understand their partner.
Hence, teenagers likely struggle to deal with the complexities of intimacy, compromise, and commitment due to their childish behavior, thoughts, and actions.
Having a lack of prior experience leads to mismatched and unrealistic expectations that are fueled by movies and social media which put unnecessary stress on the relationship. Thus, high school relationship often fails as a result of higher and unnatural expectations from the relationship and partners.
7. Different Life Trajectories:
Student life is full of uncertainty because individuals have no idea where life will bring them in the future. With changing priorities, students realize their ultimate goals and aspirations in life, and most of the time that are not compatible with their partners. Such discrepancies often result in the end of the relationship by having mutual respect intact.
High school relationships are one of the most beautiful feelings, memories, and experiences in the world that can be either positive or negative. If you had a positive experience in your high school relationship, it’ll definitely help you to foster your personal, emotional, and social growth. But if the experience was a bitter one, don’t be sad because the negative experiences from the past will make you wise.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):
Generally, high school relationships are termed short-term relationships. According to studies, only 20% of high school relationships end in the university, and out of them, only 10% conclude in a marriage.
Whether a high school relationship lasts longer depends on the couple’s experience, attitude, future goals, behavior, etc.
Due to immaturity and lack of experience, most high school couples separate in a short time, but if one can maintain it properly, he/she can have a long-term relationship with a high school sweetheart.
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