Love is THE Fact of Life

Love is a fact of life. For all human beings, and especially for teenagers, it could be said that love is THE fact of life. It is one thing that is central to all human existence. You might have come to this realization already. Simply by looking into your own mind and noticing how much of your time it spends thinking about people of the opposite sex, fantasizing about people of the opposite sex, dreaming about people of the opposite sex, wondering about people of the opposite sex, feeling depressed about people of the opposite sex and so on, you get a good idea of how important this topic is in the human realm.
Because it is so important and so central to human existence, love is something that can be extremely confusing and frustrating. I know that as a teenager love was extremely confusing and frustrating to me. I had a huge number of questions about the whole space, including (If you are a girl, please replace "girl" with "boy" in the following questions):

• Why do girls hate me?
• Why do I feel so awkward around girls?
• Why is it that I think about girls all the time, despite the fact that I would rather not?
• Why does it hurt so much?
• Why does it seem like a lot of people don’t have these problems? Why does it seem like they are able to walk up to girls, talk to them and the next minute they are going out together and having a really great time? Why are a lot of those people athletes?
• Why are pretty girls like they are?
• Why do a lot of girls seem attracted to guys who are obviously idiots and who treat them badly? I would treat a girl great, but that seems to make no difference. Why?
• What is jealousy, and why do I get so angry about it?
• Will I ever find someone who I can marry?
• When?
• Why can’t it be now?
• How will I know when I have found the girl I should marry?
• Now that I think about it, what is marriage again? Why do we have marriage? Why don’t we all just go around having sex with whoever we feel like all the time?
• For that matter, what is love? I mean, what the heck is going on here to begin with?
• Why does it seem like adults don’t have these problems?
• Why do my parents say they are "in love," but it looks so different from what I mean when I say I am "in love"? In other words, why does their love seem so boring, why do they have fights and why do they never hold hands?
• And so on.

You might have asked one or two of these questions yourself. Obviously, this is a pretty big and complicated space.One way to begin to get a handle on love and to begin to understand it better is to try to tackle it one piece at a time. We will start with the fundamental facts of life concerning love. Once you understand these facts you have a foundation. Then you can move on to other areas.