Love is one of the weirdest, yet most amazing things you can ever experience.

One day, you’re just friends with someone and the next day that person is everything. You’re spending so much time with this one person that you find the littlest things can make your insides tingle and be filled with warmth and happiness. Suddenly, this one person can bring you all the comfort and security you could ever dream of just by intertwining their fingers with yours.

Now in high school, this kind of love is often dismissed as not being real love simply because of our age. Let me tell you, that’s bull. Love has no age requirement, it can be found when you’re 6 years old or when you’re 60.

So if you’re like me, you had your amazing high school sweetheart. Not to brag, but my love story is pretty great. He was the boy that I sat next to in class. I’d catch a glimpse of him as he quickly turned away hoping I hadn’t caught him looking at me, but of course I had, and it made the butterflies in my stomach go crazy. Finally, he asked me out, and I’ll be real with you, I didn’t think we would make it past a month because we were the most awkward couple you’d ever seen. Just imagine a very tall boy with a baseball build and a very short girl who literally didn’t even know how to communicate with each other anymore, all because they now had the “official” title.

However, about a month into our relationship, I sat him down and decided to be completely vulnerable with him about my story up to that point and my feelings. Something clicked that night; I can’t explain it, but the next day he and I were head over heels for each other. For the next year we went on countless adventures and made the most incredible memories that I will always cherish.

Then senior year came and all the stress that comes with it. He and I tried so hard to make it work but different things kept pulling us apart. It was time, unfortunately, for us to go our separate ways. It especially sucked because it was a week from our one-year anniversary and just a few short weeks from Christmas, but hey, it was all part of a plan that is much better than I can even imagine.

Here I was smack dab in the middle of senior year without the person I’d had by my side for a year and I honestly did not know what to do with myself. I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with this boy from my high school Algebra 2 class that knew how to take my breath away and make me feel like the prettiest girl in the whole world.

How am I supposed to flirt? Do I jump into a rebound relationship to make him jealous? Am I supposed to hate him? What is going on? I still can’t answer that last question, but that is okay. As much as that break up absolutely sucked, it was necessary for me to become a better version of myself. I’ll admit that there are days even now where I’ll look back at that relationship and miss it, but the adventures coming, I’m sure, are so much better than the ones I had. Like I said, love is such an insanely weird thing, but when you find it, cherish it. I don’t care how old you are or how many people are waiting for you to fall, when you find something that special, it is important to hold on to it.

For those of us, however, that don’t get the happily ever after we thought we’d get; just know that it’s okay. That person may have given you the world back then, but there is someone else out there that has an even bigger world to give that will expand your perspective far beyond the horizons you originally had.

So believe in the high school sweethearts that think they've found love, they may have! And even if they haven’t, even if they aren’t the one, believe in a one. The reality is, we will go through a lot of “ones” before finding the one. There is a person that will sweep you off your feet in some way, you may not know it at the time, but that person will be there.

That’s the journey, experiencing things you never could have imagined, loving people you never thought you’d love, and overcoming challenges you never thought you could.