I was on the phone with one of my childhood best friends the other day; he had recently broken up with his girlfriend, and he declared to me that he was done. Done with relationships, done with women, done with it all. He said since he wasn’t planning on getting married anytime soon; he was tired of wasting time on relationships that, without fail, would end in heartbreak. 

Two weeks later, he called me to tell me about the new girl he was seeing. 

Rather than bringing up his strong words from before, I asked about her, knowing I would hear the smile in his voice while he talked about her. 

In my senior year of high school, at a friend’s dinner party, his mom told us this was the only time in our lives we were going to be surrounded by hundreds — if not thousands — of like-minded people our own age, that there would never be a better environment to fall in love. We scoffed, finding it ridiculous that we were expected to find our future life partners in college. 

But now that I’m in my second year, I’m finding a bit of truth to what she said. I don’t think I have found the person who I will share my dream townhouse and bookshelf with, but I have found myself in relationships that have opened up multitudes of emotions, introspections and lessons I wouldn’t have gotten without them. And to me, that is the point of relationships at this age. 

From high school to college, from internships to clubs, the one thing all my friend groups consistently discuss are our love lives. The anxieties, conversations and decisions we encounter are essential to our development. As we get older, growing through love, both learning ourselves and others better, is the most important thing we can do. 

By entering and growing from relationships, we push ourselves out of our comfort zone. We learn to take emotional risks by introducing the possibility of getting hurt, practice mindful communication that will be needed in every aspect of our lives and embrace the most overwhelming emotion — love — headon. 

I found myself out of my comfort zone a couple weekends ago, sharing a Lime scooter for the first time, flying through downtown Los Angeles in the rain, sharing AirPods blasting “I Love the Way You Love” by Little Beaver, on a mission for a quesadilla from Avenue 26. 

I was overwhelmed by a sense of carefreeness, a feeling I had lost as college grew more serious and my future seemed more tangible. For 30 minutes, I felt truly 19 years old, racing through a city freezing and drenched while sneaking in warm looks into each other’s eyes at traffic lights with someone I feltfeel free with. 

As social media pushes us to view every aspect of our relationships with different rules and theories, like the bird theory — where you tell your partner “I saw a bird today” and their level of interest in your statement decides how much they care about you — or the three-month-rule — when the state of your relationship is decided by how you feel about each other three months in — , we lose the magic of free-falling that love is supposed to be. 

On theories within the frame of relationships, Alexandra Solomon, a clinical psychologist, said in an interview with PBS that “We’re drawn to [theories and tests] because there are few things in our lives that make us feel quite as vulnerable as our intimate relationships do.”. 

But relationships, like people, are not monoliths, and no single test will tell you whether someone is right for you or not. The only way you’ll grow is if you have the difficult conversations and the honest reflection. 

By no means am I asking you to force yourself into relationships that aren’t right for you, or to constantly look for love. But in the age of the situationship, I highly encourage our generation to abandon their fears of vulnerability and emotional honesty. 

Generation Z is notably a generation unable to lean into uncomfortability. 56% of Gen Z respondents for a 2024 Hinge survey said that being afraid of rejection has held them back from pursuing relationships. 

As my fellow Opinion writer and Daily Trojan Outreach Director Luisa Luo wrote, many of us struggle with the “mentality of wanting intimacy but avoiding vulnerability.” The only way to combat this culture is by diving head-first. 

Ask for the girl in your class who always has the best answers’ number. Go up to the person with cool hair and compliment them. Tell the guy you met at your friend’s performance you think he’s cute, maybe you’ll end up eating the best quesadilla of your life with him. I can’t promise it will work out, but when it does, it will be worth it. 

I’ve always believed that if humans were meant to be solitary, we wouldn’t be able to love. And if 20-year-olds were supposed to be adults, we wouldn’t have college. You will never be this young, free and capable of growing. Take advantage of it.