What Every Teenager Must Know

At a stage in adolescence you begin to get attracted to the opposite sex. So strong is this attraction that you cannot think straight. You begin to feel that you are experiencing the nicest moments on earth and that is when you make unrealistic promises.

Advice from friends and parents against your wish falls on deaf ears. That is when you often say “I'm madly in love” with a boy or a girl.

At that point, you make meaningless promises to each other, such as being there for each other forever, getting married in the future, etc., forgetting that the future is unknown.

Sometimes you may go all out to make commitments and even go to the extent of undertaking a blood covenant. A blood covenant, apart from its spiritual implications, is very dangerous, since you could easily contract the deadly HIV/AIDS disease through blood contact if the other person is infected.

What you tend to forget or don't know is that people who enter into relationships at such ages hardly get married when they are grown. This is because as you grow up you realise that your world view changes and that whatever attracts you to the person no longer appeals to you.

You tend to admire other people more than you admired him or her, then you may split. At that point if you have had intimacy with him or her, you will realise that it was not worth it at all.

You will continue to meet people as you climb the academic ladder, from JHS through to the tertiary level. If you have intimacy with all the people you met along the way, you can imagine the sort of person you will be.  Apart from losing self respect, you will be lucky if you don't contract any deadly disease.

Now the world has changed so much and you are able to watch and learn about many things in other countries from television, radio and books but don't try to experiment with these things you see, hear or read about. Most of them are mere acting and pretence.

If you ever try a blood covenant, your guilt will bounce back at you at the time of marriage, especially when you end up marrying someone other than the person you made the covenant with. Guilt will set in and if you don't take care it would haunt you forever.

So why don't you avoid committing yourself to any particular person that you call 'your boyfriend or girlfriend' at this stage that you are in school.

What you feel now might not really be love but attraction based on beauty, brilliance of the person or even the wealth of that person's parents.

And since you do not know what the future holds for you, it is better to commit all the energy in you into excelling academically, for you will never regret that, instead of wasting it on relationships which will never help you in any way.

By Adeline Koramoah