The Big Idea: Why We Should Take Teen Love More Seriously | Psychology

I I don’t keep many things from my teenage years. I have a box of photos: blurry snapshots from holidays and parties, captured on disposable cameras and developed at Boots. I have a stack of A-level psychology notes, kept as a tribute to my later career. And I wrote a letter to a boy named Ben (not his real name) when we were both 17. We were friends first, then he was my boyfriend, and then he broke my heart.

I took the train to school, and for years Ben and I walked to and from the station, sometimes bouncing a tennis ball between us as we talked. We discovered movies, music, and books together, and on weekends we got drunk with our friends. When half of our year group descended on Newquay for a week after our GCSEs, we lay on the beach together one evening and sang our hearts out. But most of all, we talked: about life, about who we thought we could be, and what we wanted in the hazy future that lay before us.

In the early years, Ben and I were ‘just friends’: I had a boyfriend, then he had a girlfriend. But eventually something inevitably happened. We were seventeen, and in the long span of teenage years, it truly felt like we’d been waiting forever for that moment. I drove to his house after a party, his parents were away, and we kissed on the couch in his living room. Afterwards, I remember us saying “Oh my God” to each other over and over again, all the words blending together into one. It didn’t even take me days to tell him I loved him; it was barely an hour.

The weeks that followed were weightless. I was very happy to be seen with him so that people knew I was his girlfriend. About that time he wrote me the letter. It started with the list of things he liked about me. Then he told me that he couldn’t believe this was happening, that no matter what problems we had now or in the future, we would get through it, and that he couldn’t believe how lucky he was. He ended by saying: “Sorry for the incoherence of this letter, I want you in my bed.” If I had been on cloud nine before, that letter sent me into space.

About two weeks later, Ben broke up with me. There was no clear justification – perhaps something about wanting his freedom, but nothing that even remotely explained how abruptly and completely he had changed his mind. But that was it. I had to go to school with him the next day, and every other day after that. Due to an administrative setback, we sat at adjacent desks with our A-levels. Then, and every day since we broke up, he blindsided me.

The immediate aftermath was terrible. I remember standing in the shower and wondering how long it would take before I stopped loving him. Of course, I eventually dropped out: I went to college, moved on with my life, and fell in love again. But for years I regularly dreamed about him. The dreams were always the same: we were reunited somehow and he apologized. Often my current partner would appear in the dreams, perhaps an attempt by my sleep-addled brain to remind me that things had happened a long time ago, that I was now happy. Until recently, I felt really ashamed of these nocturnal visits: a woman in her thirties still dreaming of a brief teenage love.

Then I started writing a book about adolescence. I realized that I was not the only one who had a relationship with a huge impact during my teenage years. I read about a 2003 study that included adults ages 20 to 94 asked to remember when they had felt different emotions most strongly in their lives. Participants in their 20s often reported being most in love at this time, but for all other age groups the peak was at age 15. When I read about this, I was floored: these are often the most emotionally intense relationships of our lives.

But in society, teenage love is rejected. The expression ‘puppy love’ is used, which means something youthful: a transient, infantile affection. There seems to be a real appetite and respect for teenage lovers in fiction – from Romeo and Juliet to Normal People’s Connell and Marianne – that is completely at odds with the notions of teenage love in the real world. It’s as if we give ourselves permission to acknowledge the power of adolescent love in stories, but can’t publicly acknowledge it about ourselves.

This dismissal has enormous consequences for real teenagers, from the simple fact that their pain is ignored to something much worse. In 2023, that was 15-year-old Holly Newton murdered by her 16-year-old ex-boyfriend, who had obsessively stalked and controlled her. Although it is clearly relevant that they once had a romantic relationship, the court did not officially record that Holly was a victim of domestic violence because she was under 16 years old. But there is plenty of research proof that teenagers, especially boys, can be violent and abusive towards their romantic partners, and that the psychological consequences for victims are just as real as in adulthood.

Once you understand the context of adolescent development, the severity of these relationships becomes easier to understand. Adolescence is a critical period of identity formation, when we first grapple with the fundamental question:Who am I?” We look to others for the answer. The psychologist Erik Erikson wrote in 1968: in summary adolescent love as an “attempt to arrive at the definition of one’s identity by projecting one’s own diffuse self-image onto another and thus seeing it reflected and gradually clarified.”

Furthermore, in teenage relationships, developing identities become intertwined. When my own relationship ended when I was seventeen, I realized that everything I had discovered about myself over the years was intertwined with memories of Ben. The only way to get him out of my brain was to destroy pieces of myself, erasing the nascent identity I thought I liked. Seeing it through this lens, I finally began to understand why the aftermath was so difficult.

For the first time, I also began to understand things from Ben’s point of view. The research shows that teens often initiate a breakup when they feel that the relationship is hindering or blocking certain basic needs, such as intimacy, autonomy, or social status. For a teen, a romantic relationship can provide a liberating opportunity – for sexual experience, personal validation, social status, fun – but when they are then trapped in a commitment, it can quickly become quite the opposite. I understood that the boy I had given my heart to was also an adolescent, just trying to understand who he was.

While I was writing about all this, something else happened: I saw Ben again. One of my school friends had kept in touch and we were both invited to her wedding. On the day itself, as I was getting ready in my bedroom at the hotel, I became numb to my nervousness. Somehow my legs carried me down, and then there he was: right in front of me, talking to me with his wife by his side.

Seeing Ben as a married man in his thirties made me realize that the seventeen-year-old who broke my heart no longer existed. That boy had been replaced by a stranger who only looked like him. Finally, the ghost that wandered through my nighttime mind began to fade. But I will always keep his letter. That letter represents a fundamental experience that made me who I am: to truly love someone for his or her spirit, and to be loved that way, however briefly, in return. It also represents the fact that I dealt with not being loved at a young and vulnerable age, and that is also part of who I am. The letter was a wound and then a scar, and now I am finally healed.

Lucy Foulkes is the author of Coming of age (Vintage).

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Inventing ourselves by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (Black Swan, £10.99)

The incredible teenage brain by Bettina Hohnen, Jane Gilmour and Tara Murphy (Jessica Kingsley, £16.99)