Just when you think you’ve found the right person, they slip out of your reach. Just when you think you’ve settled down with the person who says they love you, you realize it’s all just a scam. Just when you think you really know someone, you realize they’ve been hiding their true personalities this entire time.

The teen years are truly a different experience from the rest of your life. It’s when your body starts developing and you start noticing parts of you that you never knew you had. It’s when the singing quality of your voice begins to mature and settle. It’s when your hormones start firing like crazy. When you’re a teenager, you suddenly start realizing that the girl sitting behind you in English class is actually sort of cute, or that one of the guys in your gym class turns your stomach into a butterfly cage. All the hormonal imbalances and strange changes in your body are normal and to be expected. Falling in “love,” however, might not be.

What is love? According to Webster’s Dictionary, love is “a strong affection for or attachment or devotion to a person or persons.” On the other hand, lust is “to feel an intense desire, especially sexual desire.” Taking a step into the normal world, love is what you see radiating around the old couple sitting on the bench in the park holding hands, sitting in comfortable silence because words are not needed to describe their sentiments. Love is what you see in the eyes of a father looking over his newborn baby and into the eyes of his wife that he adores. Lust is what you see most of the time when you walk through the doors of a High School.

If you asked a random teenaged guy with a girlfriend why they asked her out, chances are that the answer will be something along the lines of, “She’s hot.” If you then turned and asked the girl why she said yes when her boyfriend asked her out, she’d probably giggle and say, “I don’t know,” followed by another set of giggles. These two people are the prime examples of a couple you’d always find making-out in the stairwells. Of course, if you’re really lucky, you’ll have the pleasure of meeting the few couples who genuinely love one another (this is a rare occurrence in High School). If you look carefully, you’ll see the guy gently squeeze the girls’ hand when she’s nervous or scared and hold the door open for her. You’ll see her brush back his hair or absent-mindedly fix his shirt. Unfortunately, you don’t see much of these relationships in teens because they are mostly full of lust, not love.

Lust makes people cheat. It drives men and women to fulfill their desires, even when they’ve promised themselves to other people, be it in marriage or a simple relationship. Love doesn’t do that.

What teenagers just don’t seem to realize is that when you love someone, you’d be willing to give up everything for them. But if they loved you back, they’d never ask you to.