Life has a lot of nuances, but there are some situations in which you fall into a category: either you’ve had a partner, or you haven’t.

By the age of 20, most people will fall into the former category. In fact, it’s almost an expectation to have had your first partner by that age.

But what if you haven’t?

Fear not, for I fell into that category until I turned 20 years and three weeks old! What made it worse was that throughout high school and the early years of uni, friends around me had been through girlfriends and boyfriends aplenty, while I was ecstatic with seasonal, alcohol-induced flings.

The Dangers Of “Needing A Boyfriend/Girlfriend”

For the record, those flings were fun, but you can’t help but want a partner when everyone around you is holidaying with their significant other; posting photos of their dinners-for-two on Instagram or, perhaps the most confronting of all, displaying PDA.

There were times when I would flirt with girls and try to convince myself why I should like them. We would kiss and do couple-y things like watching movies, but the feelings felt forced.

And therein lies the problem.

If you have to force yourself to like someone, it will inevitably end in acrimony. You can’t force yourself to be in love with someone, just like you can’t force yourself to befriend someone — unless, in both instances, you’re a social or financial climber, at which point you needn’t read on as this article is obsolete to you.

While I concede relationships have their positives, I believe the biggest alarm bell is if someone in their early to mid-20s is actively seeking a partner. Relationships are beneficial for our formative, pubescent years, but they should never be an end goal — rather, they should be a consequence of two people organically building rapport and sharing interests.

Relationships Aren’t Band-Aids

I think someone who’s actively seeking out a relationship has insecurities that they haven’t thoroughly addressed. They believe getting into a relationship will solve their problems, when in fact it is a Band-Aid for a broken leg. If you feel lonely or low on confidence, getting validation from a partner will help in the short term, but those same insecurities and negative emotions will reappear if they are not properly dealt with from the start.

For the record, I concede relationships offer remedial aspects you cannot gain from a friendship. For example, having your partner’s unwavering support will help you through difficult times, and having an intimate support network on-call can help you out of many a rut… and don’t even get me started on the benefits of regular sex! I simply feel a relationship is not a silver bullet that can fix underlying issues, and viewing them as such can cause disappointment and more damage.

So while in the beginning of this piece I proposed a black and white question, the crux of a relationship’s benefits is far more nuanced. All the early bloomers around me who had partners throughout high school and uni have since broken up, while I was late to the party and am now entering my second year in a relationship.

Maybe that’s a good enough sample size to advocate getting into a relationship late. Or enough to prove all relationships at this age end in failure. But maybe we’ll leave it for another piece altogether…