relationship musing- because it had to happen sometime.

I'm not going to lie, my love life hasn't exactly been amazing as of late.

I was standing on an escalator with a good friend of mine after a rough day and as we looked up along it, there was a couple being couple-y. Being exam-stressed, hormonal teenage girls, we basically said what hundreds of other girls say at some point in their lives:

Damn it, I wish I had a boyfriend.

After I split up from my friend, I thought about this for a while.

There are lots of people who want a boyfriend/girlfriend for the sake of having one. I've come to the conclusion that this is because they don't actually like someone, but because they want happiness.

Everybody wants to be happy. Nobody really knows how to become happy- there's no magical recipe or instruction pamphlet. But what we do have are stacks and stacks of romance movies and novels, which show us two characters whose love brings them joy and they live happily ever after (usually).

This is why when we're younger and our perspectives are so much narrower, its easy to come to naive conclusions when we're exposed to movies/books like Twilight on a daily basis. We're easily influenced and we lose sight of the happiness we're pursuing because joy and boyfriend become interchangeable.

I'm not saying that having a boyfriend/girlfriend is a horrible thing, I'm saying that we shouldn't assume that simply having one will bring us happiness. We shouldn't be so dependent on other people to bring us happiness, because as one of my favourite characters has said, "My happiness depends on no one else but me."

If you find someone you love, then by all means, go ahead and date each other. There's nothing wrong with that, but if what I've been saying resounds somewhere within you:

-there are other routes to happiness. We just need to stop being lazy and find them.