Build a Friendship-Foundation

June 16th:

I only had two romantic relationships in high school. One that lasted for almost half a year, and another that barely made it to two months. In terms of regular high school relationships, the first, and perhaps even the second, seem like impressive amounts of time. In terms of The King's Academy's student body's relationships, the first was about average, if not a little short, and the second hardly counted - was just a blip on my record. That does seem a little harsh, but for some reason King's students seem to think it's a horrible sin if a relationship ends. I don't know why. Well, I can't change a whole school's outlook, especially when they've only just begun to "recognize healthy, opposite-gender relationships". *facepalm*

So, I had these two relationships. And despite them both ending in, obviously, a breakup, the pain of the end could never outweigh all of the things I learned throughout the relationship. I try to live with no regrets, and thus far I think I have managed to do so because I look at the positive: not that a relationship ended, but that I grew so much during it, both as an individual and in God and His walk with me. I don't think a single minute was wasted. But that's not what I mean to be blogging about.

What I want to say is this: I believe it is crucial in a romantic relationship to be first and foremost friends - best friends even, later on in the relationship.

I got to know my first boyfriend initially as a friend because we were in the same friend group. This made it easy to transition from being just friends to dating because we already shared our friends and didn't have to try to merge two groups. We already knew some of each others' faults and knew that the other wasn't perfect - so we didn't have to deal with disillusionment when we actually began our relationship and got to know each other more deeply.

In the case of my second boyfriend, we didn't know each other as friends at all before beginning to act like a couple. This left us with very little time, if any at all, okay, no time, to become just friends. I think we missed out on a lot of each other because we didn't take the time to be friends before jumping into a romantic relationship. We didn't learn each others' weaknesses and faults, and truly ended up being disillusioned and hurt as a result. We threw our whole selves into a relationship without knowing at all who the other person was beyond the flirting. We also didn't come from the same friend group, so we had to deal with how to split our time and in my opinion (and in many others) we didn't do a very good job at keeping up our long-term friendships while in our relationship.

I think my first relationship was a success despite it ending, because we were friends, and now we are friends again because we had that foundation to rebuild our pure friendship on. The second was less successful; because we had no friendship foundation, "rebuilding" will actually have to be "building" which is SO MUCH HARDER. We already know each others' greatest faults and weaknesses and have already been hurt, so creating a friendship out of that is going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible. But I have hope.

I guess what I'm trying to say is.. don't jump into things. Don't base your decisions off physical attraction and the need for instant gratification. Take the time to be friends first. If you don't build that friendship-foundation, when everything comes tumbling down it will be a lot harder to become friends later!

I think what I've learned from these two relationships is that what I really want before getting into a romantic relationship in college is to be friends with the guy first. I'm not vowing to not date my freshman year or anything, but I do hope that in the future I will have the wisdom to wait. I want to have learned his faults and weaknesses through a strong friendship - that way, when we come upon trials in our romantic relationship, we won't be disillusioned and we'll be prepared to deal because we had had practice when we were just friends.

Yeah. Comment below, and keep it classy ;)