23.
“Forcing myself to fall in love with someone. I didn’t love her; I was in love with the idea of a girlfriend. Now to be fair, she made the same mistake. She didn’t love me. It was a bad relationship.”
“When we started dating at first, things were fine because it was the honeymoon phase. But an element that caused trouble was that her mother didn’t like me. I wasn’t her kind of person, and she had trouble letting go of her daughter; we clashed in that she would always try to change me, my appearance, and my behavior, and she hated my friends. And one of the biggest issues between my girlfriend and I was that she was jealous of any other women who looked at me. I’m not blameless in this either; I lied to her about if I talked to another woman, stopped hanging out with friends, and changed everything about myself to please her.
We almost broke up more times than I can count: Every few months or so, it was usually her trying to break up with me, but it never really ended our relationship. I tried breaking up with her a few times, too, because it just felt like we were too afraid to leave (not that I knew that at the time — at the time, I was probably thinking something more like this isn’t going anywhere). Eventually, she did break up with me, and it took me some time to realize that I was never really in love with her, but more with the idea of status/having a girlfriend. It wasn’t until I started getting over the whole thing that it became clear to me that we didn’t seem to like each other all that much — that’s why we fought as much as we did and had issues about the most random things. Ultimately I think it was a mistake, but I don’t hold it against her or myself anymore. We were teenagers after all, and it’s common to make mistakes like that.”
—u/mr-blindsight
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/lizmrichardson/biggest-teenage-regrets
