Chicks Before Dicks

In high school (and in life) people learn that they have to have priorities. Do grades come before sports? Do friends come before family? Does my boyfriend come before everyone/everything else? After a year and a half of high school (only two and a half left - yippie!) I feel that I have a pretty good sense of how high school relationships function. Many of my friends, teammate and classmates have had boyfriends or girlfriends and so have I and what has become very obvious is that people more often than not choose their boyfriend/girlfriend over their friends, which I think is really damaging.

It's not secret that teenagers' hormones are raging all the time. Walking into a high school is basically like walking into a hurricane of hormones. Unfortunately, this not only has the obvious effect of making teens horny ALL THE TIME but also blinding them. A few of my very good friends started to isolate themselves once they got into relationships. This didn't happen because their boyfriends cut them off from everybody else, but because those girls decided to pick the boy over their friends.

It's a terrible situation. These girls forget about friends and family. Some of my friends look like lost puppies when they are not with their boyfriends. When these couples are together they even start kissing in the middle of a conversation! When they are apart they only talk about their boyfriend or their relationship problems. Honestly after more than a year and a half, having to hear about how someone thinks their boyfriend might be cheating on them gets ridiculously old. One girl I am friends with only texts me when she is worried about her boyfriend at a party, when her boyfriend doesn’t have cell reception or when she needs my opinion on their relationship. It is not cute to be attached at the hip. It doesn't mean you're so in love. It's just distracting and makes girls/boys lose who they truly are. They begin to define themselves by that relationship which is a huge problem.

In my experience, this immaturity leads to a lack of trust, which is not only bad for those girls' relationships but bad for our friendship. Over the past 6 months, my friends have been getting livid at me whenever I talk to their boyfriends. One of my friends said that the only reason I've been wearing make up and dressing nicely lately was just to impress her boyfriend. Needless to say I was furious because I don’t change to impress anyone but myself. I only started doing those things because my older sister said that getting ready in the morning wakes you up (which if people know how much coffee I need to drink to wake up they would understand) and also it's the holiday season and I am happy during the holidays so why not spend a little extra time feeling nice? Of course our friends started picking sides - single friend versus girl with boyfriend - which caused so much unnecessary stress and anxiety not to mention that it weakened our once strong friendship.

Finally, what happens when these couples break up? All hell breaks lose. The person that gets broken up with (usually the clingy one) calls the dumper a “dick” or “asshole” or “tool” and many other insults. That person starts using other people to get back at the original boyfriend/girlfriend.  But after all that drama dies down, (hopefully) that person realizes that because they isolated themselves, because they accused good friends of trying to steal their significant other, they are left with fewer people who actually cared about them but got sick of being treated badly. Is it worth ending up completely without strong friendships because you thought a boy was forever? Probably not.

Anyways the point of this (other than ranting) is that we need to be able to love ourselves first. We should prioritize the people in our lives that want to be there because they care, not some high school fling. Lady Gaga says it best when she stated, “Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you're wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn't love you anymore.”