You text him. Three hours later there is no response. You get frustrated and a little angry and decide you didn’t want to talk to him anyway. Yet you continue to check your phone every other minute to see if he has finally replied. Sometimes you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment; he only wants to talk to you when its convenient for him or when he wants something from you. Other times he has been thinking about you and wanting to talk to you he just was too busy and couldn’t get on his phone. Either way, you have been obsessing over talking to him when you should have been out with friends or working on homework or something other than clinging to the phone. To all of you like this, stop.

Stop begging for someone’s attention. Stop living dependent on the affirmations and company of someone else. Stop letting your world revolve around a guy. Be complete on your own. Too many girls get caught up in analyzing how a guy feels about them based on how quickly he responds to a text or how often he wants to hang out with them. This is important to consider to a certain extent but is often taken out of control. If a guy wants to be with you then he will make the time to do it. This doesn’t mean he will drop everything going on his life and become caught up in you, he shouldn’t do that and you shouldn’t expect it. Don’t flood his phone with text messages every hour of the day because you’re worried he’ll forget about you or is talking to another girl. Allow him to still have his own friends and hobbies and interests outside of you. After all, this person you like is who he is because of all of the things he does and experiences. If both of you lose sight of everything you enjoyed before meeting one another and only become interested in each other than you are no longer the people you once were. You become uninteresting real quick and have probably doomed the relationship.

Don’t get me wrong, relationships are the best (if you’re in a good one). Before my last relationship ended, I was a bit too clingy and it got pretty bad. I would get mad when he wouldn’t respond to my text messages or Snapchats, even if the conversation was clearly at a dead end. Every free moment he had I wanted him to spend with me which led to us quickly growing bored of each other. Most of my life revolved around him and I hardly ever did anything without him. Needless to say, the relationship was over much sooner than I would have liked it to be. Looking back however, I realize that in order for a relationship to work, you need two independent people that can come together and be dependent on one other while still maintaining their separate lives.

Learning to be close to a guy without obsessing over him 24/7 has been a challenge, but has led to major improvements that I will carry with me into my next relationship. I have started hanging out with my girl friends more often (and realized that they can be a lot more fun than guys), spending more time alone working on bettering myself, and grown closer to my best friend. These experiences would not have happened if I was still wrapped up in my boyfriend. I have learned that one of the greatest feelings in this world is not feeling like you have to keep a conversation going. There is so much power in not texting a guy back and it leaves you feeling pretty satisfied that you’re the one who chose to stop talking. Speaking of satisfaction, random text messages and snap chats throughout the day show that he is thinking about you and it feels pretty great. When you talk non-stop you don’t allow yourself to have these little pleasures throughout the day. Having a separate life also allows you to have something to talk about, imagine that.

So to all of you waiting on a boy to reply, get up and do something with your life. Any relationship you have will be much healthier and happier if you have a life outside of it. Enjoy your man, but enjoy the other pleasures of life as well.