Teenage Love!

Many problems surround our youth: Studies, Choosing careers, personality development, responsibility management, drugs, smoking, moral codes etc. But the most common problem, experienced by all and still ignored to a great extent is “teenage love!”

 For one, it is not love; teenagers come up with all sorts of stories and weird assumptions based on nothing, forming fictional reasons to believe that they are indeed, in love. For example, confusing different relations like friendship and even formal relationships like that between a student and a teacher for love.

When teens experience these strange, strong feelings stirring up inside them that they have never felt before, they adamantly believe it to be love. They believe in it so strongly that nearly all of them have a fantasy backup plan prepared in case things go against their love story like running away from home or committing suicide.

As we are progressing into a newer era of technology, the link of children with their parents and siblings is becoming weaker. Teens just hang out with their friends, visit places and parties that their parents know nothing about, get loads of pocket money to spend, and cars to drive, while doing so, they forget their real family: parents and siblings, and since everybody in the house is caught up in his/her own problems, it happens that whenever teens face problems, they aren’t friendly/frank enough with their parents, so eventually they turn to their friends, who, due to belonging to the same age group , can only give immature advices such as running away and committing suicide to the love struck Romeos and Juliets.

WHAT TO DO

• Your life is not an Indian movie. Stop trying to make it look like one.

• What you feel is not love: it is infatuation.

• Infatuation might feel like love, since it’s a strong feeling in our developing adolescent minds. But, it isn’t. it’s a simple crush. We understand the difference between the two feelings as we grow older.

• Crushes often last long, from months to years. It depends how often you see or meet the person. Sometimes, hanging out with the person increases the duration of the crush. In other cases it makes you realize that there is nothing really that amazing about the person, and your crush just disappears.

• Stop creating fictional, fantasybased ideas in your head like getting married in teenage on your own or running away from home.

• Talk to at least one person in your family about it, talking about it to a mature person makes you feel better, and gives you a direction.

• Chill out, enjoy life, study, and make a career!

So, for those of you who “can’t sleep or eat” because you have a crush on someone, let me tell you again that having crushes is normal, but taking them so hard on yourself that they start to disturb you is abnormal. Don’t let it happen to you. And “BE REALISTIC”. You are not going to kill yourself, neither will you run away. That’s all talk, think about it with a cool head!

The most important part of the whole matter is the one we often tend to miss: Islam’s point of view. Our religion does not encourage such dramatically emotional relations arising between males and females AT ALL.

And for the parents, and siblings, please be understanding and friendly with your children so that they come to you to get their problems solved. Please be more concerned and connected to their lives, and the friends.