The Big Idea: Why We Should Take Teenage Love More Seriously

Adolescent passions shape our future selves, and can be every bit as powerful – and perilous – as adult relationships

I haven’t kept many things from my teenage years. I have a box of photos – hazy snapshots from holidays and parties, captured on disposable cameras and developed at Boots. I have a stack of A-level psychology notes, kept in homage to my subsequent career. And I  have a letter, from a boy called Ben (not his real name), written 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 would walk to and from the station, sometimes bouncing a tennis ball back and forth between us as we spoke. We discovered films together, and music and books, and at the weekends we got drunk with our friends. When half of our year group descended on Newquay for a week after our GCSEs, we lay on the beach together one night, singing at the top of our lungs. More than anything, though, we talked: about life, about who we thought we might be, and what we wanted from the blurry future ahead.