I saw this video the other day: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMFB8Y1gn/
It’s an 18 year old girl engaged to a 30 something man. Aside from the specifics of the relationship (which get worse the more I learn), or even the obvious power imbalance inherent in a relationship between a grown man and a teenager, what stuck out to me about this video in particular is that she is addressing how people react to the relationship, not talking about the relationship itself. She “cannot keep having the same conversation”, as the audio says. I scrolled through her page and you can see that, for someone who doesn’t want to keep having the same conversation, most of her videos are about him. Almost all of them mention his age, although always in a joking way. She’s addressing the elephant in the room while trying to assure us with her cavalier demeanor that it’s not an issue, not for her, not for them. “Yes, I know it looks bad. Just trust me, he knows. We laugh about it. We’re different”.
The comment sections on these videos are exactly what you’d expect. They range from jokes (often cruel or at least mean spirited) to genuine, heartfelt concern. Most of them boil down to “you’ll realize this is bad when you’re older” (although the tact with which they deliver the sentiment varies). This contrasts with the video about her telling her friends she liked a 33 year old in her play where the friends joke about it in the comments, laughing about the memory of their reaction knowing how it all worked out. Any friends who don’t share this attitude I suspect are no longer welcome to comment on her life. She films herself asking her parents opinion on her fiancé. They say she “could do worse”. She claims they’re being funny, and that they love him. If anyone is saying in real life what hundreds of strangers are, she’s not listening. Not yet.
That’s the thing with first love, right?
So much of our first relationship, at least as teenagers, is about how we’re seen. I know for many people relationships always maintain that superficial, status-symbol quality, but I feel like the desperate need to prove yourself worthy of love is strongest as kids. We don’t know what we’re doing, but we need everyone to think we do. We want to be worldly, we want to be grownups. We do all the dirty things guys ask for because we don’t know what we like yet, and until we figure that out we need to be whatever they want. We brag about it to our girlfriends afterwards, showing how scandalous we are, how brave, and they never ask if it felt good because that doesn’t matter. We listen to Lana del Rey and decide what’s best is always what’s most. If it hurts it means we’re doing it right. We need to be grown up, and what’s more grownup than that? Being wanted is so much better than wanting, right?
We need to show that we’re desirable above all else. Not just physically, although that is of course crucial. But we need to show that someone wants us because it proves that we’re someone worth wanting, and therefore someone worth being. The more impressive the guy is, the more impressive we are by proximity. Of course, our ideas of what constitutes an impressive partner are shallow as kids. In high school I felt the need to emphasize the fact that my boyfriend was 6’4 because I knew that was something people look for in partners. I didn’t really like having a tall boyfriend—it made me feel awkward and childish when we were together, and it hurt my neck kissing him—but I felt good being seen with a guy that height because I knew other girls wanted it. Aside from height, an easy status symbol is age. Older guys are established, they’re cool, they’re edgy. They’re who Lana sings about. Matter of fact, they’re who every girl sings about. Even Taylor Swift! If an older guy wants you, it means you’re good enough that even guys who can get older women want you. Of course, the thing we don’t realize as kids is that the guys who want us aren’t picking us over older women. They’re picking us because we’re young, not in spite of it. It’s ridiculous, it’s trivial at best and actively self-destructive at worst, but it’s easy, just like 6’0 or higher is easy. It’s a concrete factor to point to before we know what really constitutes a good partner.
Equally or more important than establishing our partner is someone impressive is establishing that the relationship itself is enviable. We need to be “couple goals”. We need to have the kind of first love, high school sweethearts love story that people write romcoms about. We need our best friend to have suitable anecdotes for her maid of honour speech at the wedding we’ve been planning in our heads since we were 14, so we make sure we tell as many cute quirky stories as possible. We need to show that we can be in a relationship that works, right from the get go, because even though we’ve been told we’re young and the mistakes we make don’t matter, everything feels frantic and permanent. When you’re a kid you think if you just run fast enough and far enough in one direction you’ll get where you need to be. Nothing is less appealing than changing directions or (god forbid) going backwards. We want to throw ourselves as far away from where we are as possible, but once we get out far enough we realize we don’t know how to get back we have to convince ourselves we don’t want to. We distance ourselves from anyone who isn’t suitably impressed by or supportive of our relationship, they’re haters. We cutoff outright anyone who goes so far as to express concern, about how old our boyfriend is, about how he talks to us, about how he talks to them. They’re “toxic”. They don’t see us for the grown, independent women we are. They don’t know how mature for our age we are. They don’t realize that he always yells for a reason. They don’t know him like we do.
But when we cut out all the toxic haters, we realize we’ve lost anyone who really cares about us enough to tell us what we didn’t want to hear. So we seek out controversy. We post our relationship on AITA threads so strangers will tell us the same things those friends tried to say, or would say if we ever told them the parts of our relationship we know better than to share. We make defiant tiktoks, knowing the comments will tell us to get out as fast as we can. We post on anonymous forums, on Instagram confession pages, on alt twitter accounts. We search up “Signs of Emotionally Abusive Relationships” or “”What Counts as Assault?” and close the tab when it starts looking too familiar. We dance around the edge of an epiphany, playing chicken with the truth we’re pretending not to know is out there. We know we’re in too deep to leave now without a good reason, so we secretly hope he cheats, or yells at us in front of the wrong person, or hurts us somewhere it leaves a mark. We tell ourselves we’ll leave if it ever gets to that point, even though we’re not sure. When you’re a teenager, embarrassment feels more painful than a lot of things. We’ll take a lot of pain to avoid humiliation.
In case you couldn’t tell, I have conflicting feelings about my first relationship.
At first I fought desperately to only have positive feelings about it. Every red flag or frustration I pushed down in order to keep up the idea I had that it was perfect, that it was good. My life was in shambles when I was 18, or it felt that way, although in hindsight most things are not irreparably broken at 18 no matter how crushingly final they feel in the moment. I threw everything I had into that relationship. I cut off my friends because they couldn’t give me the validation the relationship did—they’d rejected me, they didn’t care about me as much as he did, they weren’t there for me when I needed them like he was. I had a tantrum when my mom made me go to my brother’s hockey tournament instead of letting me stay to hang out with my boyfriend, I threw another when we got stuck in traffic on the way home from my grandma’s birthday (which I had begged to get out of) because it meant I was late to a party we were going to. In hindsight it’s all so pathetic, but as someone who’d managed to convince myself already that no one would love me I was clinging desperately to this thing as proof that might not be true. I constantly bragged about us, told cute stories about us (again all cringe-worthy in hindsight). Every picture I posted had him in it. I would complain about everything in my life except him. I pretended the relationship had nothing to do with my deteriorating mental health or friendships, clinging to it while I was drowning like it was a life raft when it fact it was an anchor.
Once I couldn’t keep up that façade any longer, once we’d broken up and I’d told people the stories I’d known not to tell before, I couldn’t find anything in my heart to look back on fondly. I screamed and cried into my pillow when my roommate was out of town, I would physically shake when I was reminded of things I’d pushed to the bottom, out of both embarrassment and the deep sadness of knowing I let things happen that I felt were going to follow me forever. When my friends and I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and one asked if there was anyone I would erase from my memory, despite the entire point of the movie I said yes without hesitation.
Now I mostly don’t think about it, just like you’re probably best not thinking about anything from when you’re 18. I don’t feel regret anymore. The years of getting over it have passed, more or less. Once in a while a memory taints the present in a way that I could live without. My (lovely) boyfriend says something in a tone of voice that reminds me of someone else and I flinch; his hair or name or some other more nebulous feature bears too close a resemblance and I’m thrust back to being 18 and miserable. But for the most part it doesn’t matter. Sometimes I wish those resemblances weren’t there, that his name or hair was just a little less familiar, but he has nice hair and a nice name, and it’s not his fault someone else did too. There would always have been something to remind me of someone. I think it would be much worse to look back on my first relationship as the one that got away instead of the one I got away from. Besides, I was a kid but he was a kid too. I’m sure that there are people who still hate me over what I did when I was 18, and they would have good reason to, but it keeps me up at night knowing that I can never take it back and no matter how much I grow I can’t make someone see me as anyone other than who I was back then. I don’t want to do that to someone else.
All of these are big feelings. All my feelings felt big at 18, much bigger than they do now, but they were also simpler. Those are the feelings you feel when you’re just learning new ones. It’s fresh, it’s painful, and you haven’t figured it out yet. You don’t know what to do with them. When I was 18 it was too complicated to accept that someone I loved had treated me badly. When I was 19 it was too complicated to accept that I had loved someone who treated me badly. Since then other things have happened that were more nuanced and less painful, and it feels silly looking back on that, juvenile. I’ve cried over plenty of people since then, in situations that also feel stupid and embarrassing in hindsight, but none of them had that naivety, that specific genre of pathetic-ness. There’s something so painful about seeing a kid try so hard and fail like that. That’s part of why the reaction to this girls videos has been so strong. But it’s part of growing up. The women sharing their stories under this girls videos know what she’s going through, probably better than she does. They’ve been feeling these big feelings for longer. I hope she hears what they’re saying when she’s ready. I hope she forgives herself for not being ready sooner. I think I’ve finally forgiven myself.