The Inkling Volume 2

Do Teenage Fr iendships and
Relationships Really Matter?
By Katie Kirkpat-
You will change. The person you are right now will be
different to the person you are in a week, two months,
five years time - in terms of your personal outlook on
the world and of the choices you make. Change is
inevitable for all of us. But do the people we surround
ourselves with have an impact on the people we
become? I, for one, think the people we choose to
know as adolescents have more of an effect on our
futures than people care to admit.
Decisions play a huge part in life as a young person.
From choosing who to sit with at lunch to choosing
what to do with our lives, we spend a lot of time
weighing up our options. The obvious thing to do when
faced with a difficult situation is to consult someone
else. Hearing the opinion of a trusted friend can be
incredibly useful for every sort of dilemma, even if only
to realise that we disagree with them. Surely it should
go without saying that the advice we receive
influences who we are? The words of wisdom gifted to
us by our friends, be them insightful or terrible, shape
our actions and thus our personalities.
One argument as to why teenage relationships are
irrelevant is that they are practice. Many claim school
is a microcosm for real life - with cliques mirroring
social groups, school councils and prefects
representing politics and GCSEs echoing employment.
To this, I say the following: why isn’t school treated as
the real life it is? By calling the interactions we have as
teenagers practice, we trivialise them. This then
allows for people disregarding the emotions of others;
being young is not an excuse to damage emotions.
When emotions are trivialised, toxic friendships and
relationships can emerge. While these are awful at any
age, they can be particularly harmful to young people.
Feelings of insecurity, misunderstanding and upset
can have lifelong effects on trust and mental health all
the way into adulthood. If anything, finding the right
kind of friends as a teenager is more important than at
any other stage of one’s life. Adolescent mental health
is a growing concern at the moment and friendships
and relationships are hugely influential to this: they
really are an issue that needs to be widely discussed.
I think it’s safe to say that our teenage friends and
partners influence our future lives...but what if
everyone’s life is influenced in the same way?
Stereotypes can make it seem like everybody’s
experience of adolescence is identical. According to
most films, TV shows and books, we all know the same
cast of quirky teens: the popular queen bee and her
sidekicks, dressed to the nines, who speak only in
gossip and cruel remarks; the nerdy outcast who sits
in the corner of the canteen, hunched over his book;
the sporty boys, yelling in the corridor; the geeks who
always come top of the class; and the protagonist type
- the everyman who doesn’t slide neatly into one
clique. We all know that stereotypes can be incredibly
harmful (especially when applied to race), but what if
there’s some truth under the damage? The
stereotypes we now see so frequently definitely didn’t
come out of nowhere; I’m sure everyone reading this
knows which category they most fit into. To an extent,
our experiences are shared.
And this applies on a more specific level too.
Beyond the superficial media perspective, in some
ways we all know different versions of the same
people. Have you ever found someone, perhaps on
social media, who appears to have a life remarkably
similar to your own? With over 7 million people on the
planet, it’s inevitable that we all have doppelgangers
in one form of another.
However, as much as I believe there is some form of
truth in stereotypes, those who claim we all have the
same experience are missing the blindingly obvious:
the people we grow up to be are far from clones. If the
adult population is so diverse, they must have had
different childhoods. Think of it as nature and nurture:
genetically we are all physically different, but if we all
experienced the same adolescence we would grow up
to have identical worldviews. This is obviously not the
case. And if you take to any adult, I’m sure they would
be able to explain how something that happened to
them as a teenager shaped their adult life - more often
than not it will be something that involved a peer.
When I started writing this article I knew the points I
wanted to make - the things I wanted to put across.
What I struggled with was working out my message:
what did I want readers to take from this? Reading
back through my draft, I found it.
I want you to appreciate the people you know, and
make sure they appreciate you. Don’t let anyone be
taken for granted. And don’t be afraid of feeling
things: what happens to you as a teenager will prepare
you for the future, so embrace the arguments, the
breakdowns, the stresses, the crushes and the happy
moments. When it comes down to it, in twenty years
you won’t remember the times you laughed or the
times you cried...you’ll remember the people who
made you feel those things.