5 Things I Learned from My High School Sweetheart
We first saw each other in seventh grade when I just started at this new school, but never really became friends until tenth grade. He was trying to be a wingman to help his friend get to know me, but we accidentally just fell for each other instead. And now we’ve been together for just over eight years.
This is the first real relationship that both of us have had (minus the 6-week summer fling I accidentally fell into at the end of ninth grade), so by no means do I have a ton of relationship experiences to share. But at the same time, I think what I’ve learned so far is still valid, and figured it wouldn’t hurt to share some snippets of what I’ve taken away over the past eight years.
ONE: You cannot change someone.
I didn’t really learn this until about three years into our relationship. During the first year of university, I was trying so hard to encourage him, motivate him, and get him to be more proactive about internship searches and striving to pave the way for a “better” future. Sounds fair, right? Until I quickly learned that this was making him very uncomfortable and started harbouring negativity into our connection.
In a relationship, you really have no control over your significant other. All you really have is the tiniest bit of influence into a very, very, small part of their mind. It’s not that they don’t love you — but the act of trying to exert some form of control just makes it hard on both of you. I found that we were both happier when I accepted and loved him for who he was, and lucky for me, I was blown away as he eventually found an amazing opportunity and embarked on an incredible career path. I’m so proud of him.
TWO: Two doesn’t really become one.
Eight years later, and there are so many things that we still disagree on. And that’s okay. We bought a house several months ago, and we’re currently deciding what kind of renovations we want to do. But we’re finding more and more things where we don’t quite see eye-to-eye — furniture placement, countertop colours, lighting fixtures, hardware finishes, where to spend, where to save…the list goes on and on.
Does this mean we’re incompatible? No way, it’d be a joke if our relationship fell apart because we couldn’t agree on house decor. It has been so important to me to realize that we’re never going to see everything the same. We are two separate entities on our own, who just happen to be much happier together. It will always be that way, and we’ll always just have to find new routes to make it work.
I still think we should pull the couch a few feet over though.
THREE: Watch what you say.
We’re lucky that we’re both generally very non-confrontational people. Because of this, we’ve pretty much never raised our voices at each other or tried to be too forceful. I mean, I guess I used to be a bit more passive aggressive, but I’ve weaned off of that a bit?
Words are really, really powerful. And if the wrong words come out, you can’t take them back. The more aggressive and emotional we become, the easier it is to accidentally say those things that you wish you didn’t — and there’s no way to fix that kind of damage. They always say that “trust is like a plate, once it’s broken it will never be restored to how it was before”. It’s the same with what you say. Don’t give your words a chance to tear each other down, because it’s so, so, so much harder to build each other back up afterwards when your emotions get the best of you. Think twice, or thrice, before you speak — I promise you it’s worth it.
FOUR: Be careful of extrapolation.
Even if you cannot change someone, it’s inevitable that they will change. We’re always growing, learning, and becoming new (hopefully better) versions of ourselves. The way we handle things now won’t be the same way we handle things in the future.
I used to have this bad habit of taking his actions right now and extrapolating them into what I imagined for our future. For example, since he wasn’t overly proactive about his internship searches, I came to the conclusion that in the future he’d never find a good job. Since he left his socks on the floor, I thought our future home would always be a mess. I laugh as I write this now, but I genuinely had these concerns. But it wasn’t fair of me to see him that way, and it only made it harder on myself to try and change those things about him just because of some imaginary future I extrapolated. Give both of you a chance to grow together, and be each other’s biggest supporter. Be the one to hold them up, they’ll know if you have their back.
FIVE: Go for the hug.
Every once in a while, out of the blue, just ask for a long hug. In those thirty seconds, I always feel a rush of gratefulness. So much runs through my mind — how nice it feels to have someone’s arms wrapped around me, how peaceful it is to just take a second in our busy lives to enjoy each other’s company, and how blessed I am to have had this same embrace for eight years. There’s an emotional connection there within a long hug that’s hard to explain with words, but it seems to help resolve misunderstandings and bring warmth. I guess it’s another gentle way of saying we’re in this together.
I don’t want to forget this feeling that I have right now, so I wrote this piece to remind myself why I’ll keep fighting for what we have. It’d be silly if I could really encompass everything I’ve learned into five short points. I know we’re going to be thrown into harder situations, more challenging times, and we’re going to face things that we really think might just actually tear us apart. But we’ve worked so hard to build each other up to where we are now. Eight years feels like a long time, but there’s still a lifetime together to learn. I can’t wait.
