Love… everyone experiences it, but can people as young as high schoolers feel love? Many people can claim they are in love, but how does one know what they are feeling is legitimately love? There is a lot of negativity toward the idea of “high school love”, so is high school love real or just a mixture of confused emotions and hormones?

The idea of high school love can be very controversial depending on one’s personal experiences and views on the actual meaning and idea of love. The word love doesn’t have one strict definition; in addition the word itself means something different to every person. Everyone has their own special encounter with love; therefore, the answer to this topic solely depends on every single person’s independent encounter with their “first love”.

In high school, with the right person and shared maturity, I think high school love is very real. Love to me is a shared feeling of respect, loyalty, and devotion that high school students can experience. Love does take time to develop, so the term “love at first sight” is not realistic to me, but with time high school students can feel, experience, and revel in the emotional roller coaster ride called love.

Coming from a high school girls perspective, people may not find this opinion surprising; however many adults do admit that they experienced their first love and heartbreak in high school. I do admit-tingly say that some teenagers can mistake their sensation of “being in love with someone” as them just loving the idea of being in love. This common mistake may be the reason many adults say that high school love isn’t real, and that teenagers aren’t mature enough to fully understand this worldwide concept called love; however science disagrees.

There is more behind love than just two people in a relationship claiming they love each other. Love, in fact, comes from a mixture of chemicals human bodies produce and yes, teenagers produce all of these. Two common hormones that are produced during the “attraction stage” in the process of falling in love is dopamine and serotonin. These two hormones explain the reason behind why people can’t stop thinking about their partner and the “butterflies” one may experience. The mix between dopamine and serotonin are even said to have the same effect on the brain as cocaine.

There are more serious hormones that explain the pneumonia of “long-term relationships” and the desire to spend the rest of your life with someone, and once again, teenagers receive these same hormones that adults do. Vasopressin and oxytocin are both hormones that create the desire to stay with someone long-term and explain the feeling of commitment. In addition, studies show that on average it only takes 88 days to fall in love with someone.

Before accusing that teenagers are too “immature” and “too young” to experience love, one must really look beneath the surface of what love is and how it develops. Everyone lives different lives and therefore everyone has different experiences; therefore, I think it is wrong of someone to claim whether someone’s love is “real or not”. It’s simply up to that person and that person only to label what they feel and statistics set aside, love is something different to everyone, therefore everyone will experience it at different times.

I personally think that there aren’t any tricks or facts behind love and that love has endless definitions. Love is just one of those things where not one person can call it true/false or wrong/right, because love simply can never be copied or forced.

Overall, in my personal experience and observance, high school love is real.