Did your mom or dad ever tell you you weren’t allowed to date until a certain age or grade? This may have been because they didn’t want you to get your heart broken or get too attached to the person. Although young-love can hurt sometimes, even long-term relationships can be beneficial to teens in the long-run.

They can teach teens to love someone and build a relationship with that person. This can oftentimes be difficult, especially for teens, because most teenagers are very focused on their own life and this teaches them to be selfless and care about another person and their life too.

You learn to make time for the person and fit them into your busy schedule. This teaches teenagers to care about someone else’s life and encourage them to be the best they can be.

Long-term relationships can also teach teens to trust people and let others into our personal life. I know, many people have trust-issues after breaking up with their boyfriend or girlfriend, but in most cases, if you’ve been in a relationship for a long time then they already have your trust and the reason to break up isn’t normally because they break that.

It’s important to learn how to trust people and break down your walls for people because if someone truly loves you and wants to get to know you then whatever you’re hiding from them isn’t going to matter.

Being in a long-term relationship also teaches you how to problem-solve. When two people spend a lot of time together and are in a relationship, of course there’s going to be fights. But in a long-term relationship, you put aside those fights and problems and learn to fix them because you value the relationship more than the fights.

You also learn to ‘give and take’. You and your boyfriend or girlfriend may take turns picking the movie that you watch that night or the restaurant that you eat at. You may let him pick one night and then you get to pick the next night.

Lastly, and most importantly, it teaches teens to communicate and let their boyfriend or girlfriend know how they feel about things. Without communication the relationship will most likely be miserable for both people.

Long-term relationships teach teens many valuable things that can not only be valuable in future relationships, but also in future friendships. These relationships that teens form through highschool teach them how to love someone and be loved by someone.