We grow up with the belief that one day we will meet prince charming, fall in love and live happily ever after. However, unlike the fairytales that we put so much faith into as little girls with naive minds, most people don’t find their true love. At least not right away. For the lucky ones, they find someone and they just know they are the one. On the other hand, for the majority of others, like me, you get blessed with falling for someone who doesn’t care about you as much as you care about them, and ultimately you’re the one who ends up heartbroken. That is exactly what happened to me during my first serious relationship.
During my sophomore year of high school, I started to get “the feels” for my friend of many years. Well, one thing led to another, and the next thing I knew we were dating. It was both of our first relationships, and from what little experience I had on the subject, things seemed to be going as well as any high school couple could expect. We had been dating for about 3 months and I was really happy, I even felt like I was in love. They are right when they say that the best relationships stem from friendships. What I didn’t expect to happen, however, was for my boyfriend, whom I thought felt the same about me as I did him, to cheat on me.
I distinctly remember I could feel this ache in my heart that hurt more than anything I had ever experienced before. Not only had I been broken up with, but I had been cheated on. That feeling of your heart physically breaking from the inside out isn’t something I would wish upon anyone, even my worst enemies. I would never even want the girl who did that to me or the guy who broke my heart for the first time, to experience that pain. I wish I could lie and say that I got over this stupid boy quickly and effortlessly but that was simply not the case. It made me question for a long time why I hadn’t been good enough. I constantly wondered why this boy had chosen someone else over me when he already had a girlfriend. I felt like it was my fault, which is the part that hurt the worst.
More than three years later, I am still no expert in relationships or how to deal with heartbreak. I do know now, though, that the only thing that can heal a broken heart is time. It is said that in order to fully get over someone it takes about the amount of time you dated, doubled. For me, that would have been 6 months, but truthfully I still deal with that pain, even now. To this very day, I still struggle with the thought of not being good enough and the fear that I will have to go through that kind of heartbreak again. I know that your first heartbreak is inevitable but to go through it at such a young age, I was 15 at the time, was really traumatizing. This was truly the point that my confidence and self-esteem hit rock bottom. I will never be thankful for what happened to me, but looking back I appreciate what I learned from this experience. I learned that other people do not have the same heart as you do, that girls can be maliciously evil, and that boys are going to break your heart sometimes. I truly appreciate the friends and family I had that got me through this tough time in my life (you know who you are). Oh, and I would also like to give a shout out to Taylor Swift’s “Red” album, without which I would have felt like the only girl to have had their heartbroken before. If Taylor Swift can get over her public heartbreaks and make millions from writing songs about them, then you can too, just as I did.
