I didn’t like my teenage years very much. I have a box of photos – blurry snaps from holidays and parties, captured on disposable cameras and developed at Boots. I have a stack of A-level psychology notes, kept in honor of my subsequent career. And I wrote a letter, from a boy called Ben (not his real name), when we were both 17. We were friends first, and 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 back and forth between us as we talked. We discovered films together, and music and books, and on weekends we got drunk with our friends. When half our year group descended on Newquay for a week after our GCSEs, one night we lay together on the beach singing at the top of our lungs. But more than anything we talked: about life, about who we thought we could be and what we wanted from the unclear future ahead.
In the early years, Ben and I were “just friends”: I had a boyfriend, then he had a girlfriend. But eventually, inevitably, something happened. We were 17, and in the long stretch 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 out, and on the sofa in his living room we kissed. I remember afterwards, again and again, we said to each other “Oh my God”, all the words merged together. It wasn’t even days before I told him I loved him; it was barely an hour.
The weeks that followed were weightless. I was delighted to be seen with him, for people to know I was his girlfriend. Around that time he wrote me the letter. It started with the list of things he loved about me. Then he told me he can’t believe this is happening, that whatever trouble we have now or in the future, we will work through it, that he can’t believe how lucky he is. He ends with the words: “Sorry for the incoherence of this letter, I want you in my bed.” If I was on cloud nine before, that letter sent me into space.
About two weeks later, Ben broke up with me. There was no clear justification – maybe something about wanting his freedom, but nothing that remotely explained how suddenly and totally he 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 a stroke of administrative mishap, we sat our A-levels at adjacent desks. Then, and every day since we broke up, he cleaned me.
The immediate aftermath was horrific. I remember standing in the shower wondering how long it would take me to stop loving him. Of course, I eventually stopped: I went to college, moved on with my life, and fell in love again. But for years I would often dream about him. The dreams were always the same: we were somehow reunited, and he apologized. Often my now-partner appeared in the dreams, perhaps an attempt by my sleep-soaked brain to remind me that things had long since moved on, that I was now happy. Until recently, I was truly ashamed of these nocturnal visits: a woman in her 30s still dreaming about a brief teenage love affair.
Then I started writing a book about adolescence. In doing so, I realized I was not the only one who experienced a very impactful relationship in my teenage years. I read about a 2003 study, in which adults were aged 20 to 94 asked to remember when in their life they felt various emotions most strongly. Participants in their 20s tended to report being most in love right now, but for all other age groups the peak was at age 15. When I read about this, it struck me: these are often the most emotionally intense relationships of our lives.
Yet teenage love is rejected in society. The phrase “puppy love” is used, indicating something youthful: a passing, infantile love. 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 attitudes held about 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 admit it publicly about ourselves.
This dismissal has huge consequences for real teenagers, from the simple fact that their pain is ignored to something much worse. In 2023 was 15-year-old Holly Newton murdered by her ex-boyfriend of 16 years, who obsessively pursued and controlled her. Despite it being clearly relevant that they were once in a romantic relationship, the courts did not officially record Holly as a victim of domestic violence because she was under 16. But there is plenty of research evidence 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 they are in adulthood.
Once you understand the context of adolescent development, the seriousness of these relationships becomes easier to understand. Adolescence is a critical period of identity formation, when we first grapple with that fundamental question: “Who am I?” We look to others for the answer. The psychologist Erik Erikson, who wrote in 1968, summarized adolescent love as an “attempt to arrive at the definition of one’s identity by projecting one’s scattered self-image onto another and thus seeing it reflected and gradually clarified”.
Moreover, developing identities become intertwined in teenage relationships. When my own relationship ended at 17, I realized that everything I had discovered about myself over the previous years was mixed up with memories of Ben. The only way to get him out of my brain was to destroy pieces of myself and erase the nascent identity I thought I loved. When I saw it through this lens, I finally began to understand why the aftermath was so difficult.
For the first time I began to understand things from Ben’s point of view as well. The research shows that teenagers often initiate interruptions when they feel the relationship is hindering or blocking certain fundamental needs, such as for intimacy, autonomy or social status. For a teenager, a romantic relationship can represent a liberating opportunity – for sexual experience, personal affirmation, social status, fun – but if it then traps them in a commitment, it can quickly become the exact opposite. I understood that the boy I gave my heart to was also an adolescent, just trying to understand who he was.
While I was writing about this, something else happened: I saw Ben again. One of my friends from school stayed in touch with him, and we were both invited to her wedding. On the day itself, as I got ready in my bedroom in the hotel, my nervousness made me numb. Somehow my legs carried me downstairs, 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 30s made me realize that the 17-year-old who broke my heart no longer exists. That boy was replaced by a stranger who looked just like him. Finally, the specter that wandered my nocturnal thoughts began to fade. But I will always keep his letter. That letter represents a fundamental experience that made me who I am: loving someone genuinely for their wits, and being loved that way, however briefly, in return. It also represents the fact that I struggled with being unloved at a young and fragile age, and it 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 Getting old (Harvest year).
Further reading
Conversations about love by Natasha Lunn (Viking, £10.99)
Finding 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)
