I’m 18 years old, and I already know that I’m not the relationship type of girl. Now before you click out of this column because that first sentence made you roll your eyes, stick with me for a second. At least not at this point in my life have I considered myself to be the relationship type of girl. I could never cling onto the idea of being tied down by a label for a long period of time. I don’t think high school relationships are cliches, or immature, or even dumb for that matter, I just think they aren’t for me.

With all that being said, I’m going to put myself out on a limb here and be completely honest in this column. I’m not the relationship type of girl but this summer, I met someone who made me want to be that type of girl. He made me want to put a label on us, and although I never gave in to doing that, it made me start liking the idea of calling someone my boyfriend. It gave me those classic teenage girl dreams of getting married (not with the guy I met over the summer, of course, I’m not that crazy) and of belonging to someone, and someone belonging to me.

Even though I had all those realizations from meeting this one boy, I still couldn’t label us. You see, before I met him, I had this idea of all relationships inevitably failing and labels being a horrible social construct. I believed that the exact place where high school relationships (and out of high school relationships)  fell apart was at the point where the two people involved started labeling everything with the words “boyfriend” or “girlfriend”.

I don’t want to make generalizations about labels because obviously there are some situations in which they work out, but those instances where they actually work are what I like to call “the healthy relationship” type of label. Most of the time people want to put a label on a relationship not for the sole reason of wanting to be with someone, but more of them not wanting other people to be with that person. It’s a way they “claim their property”, and that kind of relationship drives people insane. It makes people jealous and protective, as if the person they share this label with is actually their property, and I think it’s disgusting.

Then I met the summer boy. Let’s call him Nate. Right off the bat, I knew that I liked Nate more than the average boy, but I also knew it wasn’t enough to develop a healthy relationship underneath a label. So because I decided our relationship wasn’t good enough for a label, Nate and I fell into the hole of becoming a “thing”. For those of you who don’t exactly understand the definition of a “thing”, don’t worry, most of us don’t either. The best way I can explain it is an unspoken, sometimes exclusive relationship between two people without any labels or commitments. “Things” come with all the benefits of good morning/good night texts and Friday night dates but they tend to avoid anything “commitment like” such as meeting the families and most importantly, the boyfriend/girlfriend labels.

These types of “relationships” are traps. They are concoctions our society has created for those of us running away from our commitment issues, and they always end badly.

A few months ago, Alyssa Guzman wrote a column about “The Game” and how it’s better to be straight-up with a person rather than chase each other without understanding the dynamics of your relationship. Well, if you’re one of those people who aren’t straight-up and love playing the game, you probably understand why “things” are love traps that will inevitably lead both of the people involved to a box of tissues, tubs of ice cream and Netflix marathons.

The problem with these “things” (sorry, I don’t know what else to call them other than a “thing”) is that nothing is laid out. Remember, both participants aren’t being straight-up with each other, that’s sort of the unspoken number one rule. You never know if it’s the type of relationship where you get each other holiday presents, if you should hold his/her hand in the hallways, participate in public PDA or, most importantly, whether or not it’s an open or closed relationship. There’s the catch: the open or closed relationship. That’s why these “things” are horrible, and also why everyone always ends up getting hurt, because you never know which one it is.

Back to Nate and me, as you probably guessed, we never laid out any of those things I listed above. To say the least, things got complicated. Really complicated.

Like I said in the beginning, I’m going to be completely honest here because I feel like everyone can learn from each other’s mistakes. Nate and I were pretty much on and off between all of July to December, so I assumed we had an open relationship. I guess that was the mistake I made. You see, I didn’t exactly realize how many feelings that had been built up between us with this “thing” until I heard he was talking to another girl and I immediately got jealous. It wasn’t the type of jealousy where I realized how much I wanted to be with him, either. It was the type where I wanted to put a label on our relationship to tell this girl to back off. That’s when I realized I was becoming the exact “crazy label girl” I didn’t want to become. So instead of confronting him rationally and ending it between us, I defaulted to my jealous feelings. I wanted to make him feel how I felt, so, I kissed another boy without thinking twice.

Now, before any of you say I’m heartless and I don’t have a soul because I kissed another boy just to get revenge, I know what you’re thinking and I agree (minus any thoughts about me being heartless). I overreacted and I made a really stupid decision. It was probably one of the dumbest mistakes I made with my relationship with Nate, but this is where you all can learn from my mistakes. First is to never act on these types of jealous feelings because it leads to irrational decisions. Even though I was hurt he was talking to another girl, that was no justification for hurting him back. Revenge is never a good way to handle anything. There’s a pretty big difference between thinking about doing something, and then actually doing it. Nate was the one with the thoughts, I was the one who crossed the line and took an action. I now look back on all of this and realize that I thought of my relationship with Nate as a game.

I feel like a lot of us think of relationships as a game sometimes. Who can ignore each others texts the longest, be more mysterious, or who can even chase them the longest? I was the one who liked being chased, and that’s exactly what Nate did over those six months. Relationships aren’t, and shouldn’t be games. Yes, sometimes the chase can be fun, and being the one chased is definitely fun, but it gets tiring. Our relationship was based around a chase, the exact thing a relationship shouldn’t be based around because in reality, a chase is just avoiding the real things that come with a relationship. Feelings, commitment and trust; most of us are just not ready to give that to another person, and I’m one of those people. If you’re not ready to do that for another person, you’re not ready to enter into a relationship without it ending badly.

When I kissed the other boy to get Nate jealous, I proved to myself why I couldn’t label our relationship. I wanted Nate for all the wrong reasons, and I wasn’t sure about the right reasons to want him because we never laid out the dynamics of our relationship. If we had been more straight-up with each other things would have definitely turned out differently. For example, if at any point he gave me the ultimatum of being exclusive maybe I would have said no right off the bat. That would have saved so much time and drama. Or maybe, in another situation, if he gave me the same ultimatum, I would have said yes and realized how much I liked him. But that was the number one mistake Nate and I made, we were never straight-up which lead to us to not trusting each other, becoming jealous and basically leading to our relationship failing.

If you’re wondering what happened to my relationship with Nate after I kissed that other boy, it went down the drain. We’re not a “thing” anymore, we’re not even friends. In fact, remember that girl I told you about above that Nate was talking to? Well, about two weeks after Nate and I broke off our overplayed and cliched, six-month long “thing”, he entered into a labeled relationship with her. That was something I could never do with him but he finally found that girl who was willing to commit a label to him. With that, I say good luck to them both.

Within these six months, I think three key lessons came out of this experience that I wanted to share with all of you. The first lesson was what I was talking about above, defaulting on jealous feelings. Jealousy never leads to anything good. If I could have changed anything about that situation, I would have just confronted Nate. If you feel like you don’t have the ability to share your true feelings with your counterpart, you shouldn’t be in a relationship with them.

That brings me to my second lesson, being straight up and setting boundaries. If Nate and I were in a committed relationship, I would have never kissed that other boy because I would have realized that we had set boundaries. Without setting any sort of boundaries, relationships are going to get really messy. You need to feel comfortable enough with whoever you’re with to trust them and I truly think the only way to do that is by being straight up throughout the entire relationship. Trust is the most important building block for a strong, stable relationship. Without trust and a set amount of boundaries, your relationship (like mine) is going to tumble down into piles of dust.

And lastly, the third most important lesson I learned that I want to share with all of you are a few reasons why “the chase” is bad. I know I’m not the only one who gets caught up in the chase and being “mysterious”, and I also know I’m not the only one who overplays it. Even though I truly liked Nate as a person, I’ve realized the main mistake I made over these past six months was that I forced him into a chase he didn’t even want to have to begin with.

I made Nate chase, and chase, and chase, and finally we both realized that a relationship shouldn’t be made up of running miles for the other person. It should be made up of an equal chase, where you actually catch the person at a finish line. I never created that finish line for Nate and I’s relationship, and I’m glad Nate finally found a girl who let him catch her. He deserves that, everyone does. No one deserves to be trapped in an endless chase, and as cheesy as this is going to sound, I have hope that one day people like me who hate the idea of labels and long-term commitments will find someone worth crossing that finish line for. As for now, I’ll be focusing on the basics of forming a healthy relationship. It always feels good to start over on a nice, clean slate.