Your Social Life, Dating and Relationships

As much as you love your family--OK, so you don't always love your family, but most of the time you do--you need friends in your life. Especially when you are a teenager. When you are with people your own age it is usually easier to have more fun than with your family.

Friends are usually on the same wavelength as you are. You can talk to them about everything. You can laugh together and cry together. Friends understand you, your moods, your problems and your worries. They share your dreams, doubts and fears, and most importantly they love you for being yourself. When you are a teen, sometimes your friends feel more like family than your own family does. Why is that? Because you chose your friends. It is at this period in a teen's life that people such as the parental units are looked upon as out of touch with their child's environment and are frequently seen as the "policing" units rather than parents.

Because so much is going on in your head as a teenager that it seems as if no one else understands you but your close friends, and that parents cannot appreciate your stressors and life issues. Teens not only have to grapple with their emotional ups and downs, but also with hormones, peer pressures and trying to understand their bodies. Having close relationships with the opposite sex can be very exciting and gratifying, but with that comes the urge to explore each other sexually, and most often this is engaged with either a very limited knowledge base about sex, pregnancy, contraception and STDs, or the inability to rise above the hormonal rages that beset the teenager.

Friendships formed during your teen years may come and go, but some will last into your adult years; some even for a lifetime. Remember, you are only a teenager once; this can be very stressful years and friendships.