**Dear Daisy is our new agony aunt column, where Daisy Buchanan answers all of your big questions, from how to be more assertive to how to move on from sexual assault. Daisy's first job in journalism in her twenties was on the problems page at Bliss Magazine. This week, she helps a reader who is questioning her long-term relationship.
Dear Daisy,
I have been with my boyfriend for nearly 4 years now and our relationship couldn't get any better, he's my best friend as well as my lover and I can trust him with my life. Recently I have been having doubts about our relationship lasting as he is my first ever boyfriend, and I have completely fallen for him. I got with him at the age of 16 and have never had the experiences my friends have had, I've never had sex with anyone else, I've never been intimate with anyone else and sometimes I wonder whether I'm missing out. I worry that if we do stay together it will only
be in a couple of years that I'll want to experience these things. Do I leave the person I'm in love with because I've gone into this too fast, too young?
A
Dear A,
It sounds like you have a relationship millions would envy. Not many of us manage to lose our virginity to someone who adores us, and someone we still want to be with four years later. We’re all desperate to meet that someone we want to hook up and hang out with for the foreseeable future. It seems as though you’ve already found the relationship a lot of us spend our twenties looking for. You don’t know how good you’ve got it – but you know you don’t know.
As long as you’re happy, then I don’t think you need to leave your boyfriend. Someone wiser than me once said: ‘We can either do exactly the same thing with a bunch of different people, or choose one person to do everything with.’ It’s easy to experience FOMO when you’ve never had a chance to experience the single adult life. When I broke up with my first ever boyfriend (we met when we were 15 and stayed together for five years) I assumed I would embark upon a career of sexy adventuring and complicated lingerie. Then I was horribly disappointed when I discovered what I had been ‘missing out’ on, and occasionally wondered whether I’d ever bother having sex again.
But you know this isn’t just about sex. I think you’re aware that you’ve changed dramatically between the ages of 16 and 20, and you’re about to change even more as the next decade progresses. When you’re with someone you love, you grow around them. But the more you grow with someone else, and the younger you are when you do that formative growing, the harder it is to stand on your own when you need to.
I don’t think you need to break up with your boyfriend, but you do have to talk to him about how you’re feeling. If you let these feelings fester then it’s going to get harder to make up your mind and over time you may start to resent him for holding you back, which isn’t fair on either of you. When you’ve never been with anyone else, it can feel impossible to imagine a future apart. I think the biggest disadvantage of meeting the love of your life in your teens is that it’s harder to have a rational perspective on your relationship. When you’ve loved hard and survived heartbreak, you know that you can survive and be happy alone and with a partner. If you’ve been with the same person since you turned 16, thinking about being single is like standing on the edge of a precipice, with nothing but shadows beneath you. Should either of you decide you want to leap into the unknown, you’ll flail for a little while before finding your feet.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether we’re 16 or 20 or 30 or 80 - we can only take our relationships one day at a time. That isn’t to say that we can’t hope and plan for our romantic futures, but there is no guarantee that your feelings will stay the same for your partner, no matter what stage you’re at in life. You don’t need to leave someone today just in case you stop loving them tomorrow. But you can’t stay with them forever purely because you can’t imagine life without them.
Good luck,
Daisy x