He just doesn’t like you that much: why being rejected isn’t mean

You haven’t ‘failed’. The opposite of love is indifference

Staring across at my lovely fifteen year old boyfriend, my eyes flooded with tears. He’d just broken up with me, and I had never experienced any pain like it in my life. It’s easy to laugh, a decade on, at how incredibly distraught I was over the end of a three week relationship, but you couldn’t pay me to relive the horror of that intense, deep sense of abandonment and rejection. What was wrong with me? What if no one ever loved me? What did I do wrong?

Actually, nothing. I was just a teenager he didn’t fancy anymore. It was a teenage situationship. We were never going to work out: and even writing that now amuses me. Why does any relationship fail, at 15 or 50? Incompatibility, lack of communication, and yes, probably in my case, my jaded, cynical attempts to be cool that come with being in Year 9. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t my fault. But it was over, and I’d have rather jumped into a pit of snakes…