When I was a teenager, I thought relationships were stupid.

Not love.

Love seemed beautiful.

Relationships just seemed terribly inconvenient.

My friends were dating, kissing boys, having crushes, crying over people, getting back together, breaking up again.

And I remember looking at all of it thinking:

Why would I voluntarily add this problem to my life?

There were exams.

University.

Things I wanted to achieve.

And, in my teenage brain, relationships came with a very clear list of possible consequences:

Getting pregnant.

Getting distracted.

Dropping out of university.

Ruining your plans.

Very romantic.

So I made a decision.

I would deal with love later.

When I was an adult.

I wanted to do love correctly

Looking back, this is very funny to me.

Because essentially, I wanted to make one of the least controllable human experiences as administratively sound as possible.

My theory was simple.

Teenagers don’t know anything.

Adults have experience.

Adults know themselves.

Adults know what they want and what they don’t want.

Adults understand consequences.

Therefore, adulthood seemed like a much safer place to be vulnerable.

I wasn’t scared of love itself.

I was scared of making a mistake.

I thought that if I waited long enough, I could reduce the risk.

I’d be mature.

The other person would be mature.

We would both understand what we were doing.

We’d communicate.

We’d behave responsibly.

We’d make sensible decisions.

Again:

Very romantic.

So I waited.

Then I became an adult

I started dating in my early twenties.

And when things didn’t work, I accepted it relatively easily.

These were adult choices.

Sometimes you choose someone.

Sometimes it doesn’t work.

Fine.

That’s life.

But then I moved to Ireland.

And moving abroad did something strange to me.

I felt like a blank book.

Nobody knew me.

Nobody knew who I’d been at school.

Nobody knew my family.

Nobody knew the version of me that existed in Argentina.

For the first time in my life, I could discover who I was without constantly comparing myself to who I’d always been.

And apparently one of the first things Dublin wanted to teach me was dating.

Dublin introduced me to Tinder

My first weekend in Ireland, a girl from the residence had tickets for free drinks at a place called Sam’s.

She gave them to me and another Argentine girl.

So we went.

We met two Italian guys.

Eventually we ended up at their apartment.

Nothing happened.

Absolutely nothing.

But I remember the whole situation feeling incredibly adventurous.

I’d barely arrived in the country.

My English was nowhere near what it is now.

I was suddenly socialising with people from completely different places.

Everything felt new.

Then I started English school.

There were women from Japan, Russia, Brazil.

At some point they were showing each other photos of men.

I asked:

“Where are you meeting all these people?”

They looked at me like I’d asked where the internet was.

“Tinder.”

Then basically:

Download Tinder. Now.

So I did.

And honestly, Tinder probably taught me more about Dublin nightlife than any travel guide ever could.

Most of the bars I knew during those first years?

Tinder dates.

Where I didn’t pay, obviously.

Educational and economical.

My first lesson was space

I dated a Brazilian guy for maybe a month or a month and a half.

He was incredibly attentive.

Flowers.

Food.

Cinema.

Plans.

Constant communication.

On paper, lovely.

In reality, I felt suffocated.

At the time I was working ridiculous hours making sushi — sometimes from six in the morning until six at night.

When I finished work, I didn’t necessarily want romance.

I wanted a shower.

Food.

Silence.

And nobody asking where I was.

Once, while I was in Amsterdam, he got upset because I had time to post an Instagram story but hadn’t replied to his messages.

And something in me immediately went:

No.

I didn’t want someone monitoring how I used my time.

So I ended it.

At that point I thought:

Good.

See?

This is what adulthood looks like.

You know your boundaries.

You recognise what doesn’t work.

You leave.

Very sensible.

Then I met an Italian.

And apparently my administrative system for love collapsed.

The Italian hippie

By then I had moved apartments.

At one point I was living with three women and six men.

Later, an Italian guy and a French guy moved in.

Technically, I could have chosen the French one and maybe today I’d be married somewhere in France.

But no.

Obviously I became obsessed with the Italian hippie.

There was attraction.

Adventure.

Tenderness.

Great sex.

And absolutely no evidence that this was going to become a serious relationship.

I knew that.

Did this stop me?

Of course not.

I was stubborn.

Then COVID happened.

Our landlord told us the apartment was essentially being taken by the bank.

There were nine of us in our apartment and another six people in the apartment next door.

The solution somehow became:

Let’s move all fifteen people into an enormous house together.

During lockdown.

In Dublin.

That story deserves its own article.

But for the purposes of this one, what matters is that suddenly I was living in a giant house full of people while the entire world had stopped.

There were dinners.

Cooking.

Music.

Cleaning.

People singing.

People flirting.

People annoying each other.

People becoming family because nobody could go anywhere else.

And somewhere inside all that chaos, Tinder was still Tinder.

The date I almost didn’t go on

I matched with a few people.

One guy invited me to his house to smoke weed.

This was 2020 Mar.

My immediate thought was approximately:

Absolutely not. This man is probably trying to murder me.

Another guy invited me to meet him in Merrion Square.

Same day.

Same time.

Public park.

Much more compatible with my survival strategy.

So I chose the park.

It was Dublin, so naturally there was a little drizzle.

I was sitting on the grass when he arrived.

I looked up.

And thought:

Okay. Not bad.

We started talking.

Eventually we moved to a bench.

We talked for something like four hours.

And then we went back to his apartment.

I’ll let you use your imagination.

I was determined not to fall in love

I’d already had enough little romantic disasters by then.

So I told myself:

Relax.

Don’t make this into anything.

Enjoy it.

Don’t get attached.

Be easygoing.

This worked beautifully.

For approximately no time at all.

He kept looking for me.

We kept seeing each other.

May.

June.

Then in July he went home for a holiday.

And I assumed that would be the end.

He’d go away.

Meet other women.

Life would move on.

Except he called me.

He wrote to me.

Almost every night.

And somewhere during those weeks, something changed.

I realised I was in love.

Properly.

For the first time in my life.

And I was so happy.

There is something very particular about the first time you feel chosen by someone you love.

Someone wants to know where you are.

Not to control you.

Just because they want to see you.

Someone thinks about you.

Someone takes care of you.

Someone notices when you’re sad.

I felt seen.

And it changed my face.

I remember looking at myself and thinking I looked different.

Happier.

Softer.

Like something inside me had relaxed.

And I thought:

Oh. So this is why people do this.

Maybe waiting had worked

When he came back, I planned a romantic night.

I bought gifts.

I made practically every kind of sushi I knew how to make.

We watched The Lion King.

I cried in his arms because apparently Disney was where I decided to express my emotional vulnerability.

There were mornings when he made mate for me.

Ham and cheese croissants.

When I missed my mum, he’d put on The Simpsons and we’d eat pasta.

Tiny things.

Ordinary things.

The exact kind of things that somehow become enormous when you’re in love.

And I remember thinking:

Maybe I was right.

Maybe waiting had been worth it.

Maybe this was what happened when you didn’t rush.

When you knew yourself.

When you chose carefully.

When you entered love as an adult.

Maybe I’d finally done it correctly.

The part I hadn’t planned for

At the moment when I felt safest, he told me we couldn’t have a serious relationship.

I didn’t understand.

We were happy.

At least I thought we were.

We cared about each other.

Everything seemed to be going well.

But he told me he wasn’t ready for something serious.

And my brain couldn’t process it.

I left.

I walked into a Spar and bought a pack of twenty cigarettes.

Then I went towards the sea.

And smoked.

And smoked.

And smoked.

I smoked so much that eventually my body was trembling.

And I remember asking:

Why me?

Why would you show me something this beautiful and then take it away?

What did I do?

I had waited.

I had been careful.

I had grown up.

I had built my own life.

I had become responsible.

I had finally allowed myself to be vulnerable when I believed I was old enough to handle the consequences.

And still—

there were consequences I couldn’t control.

So naturally, I tried to solve love

My mum helped me find a psychologist online.

I talked.

I cried.

I tried to understand.

But I remember feeling like nobody completely understood what I was trying to say.

Then one of my friends asked me something much simpler:

“Do you love him?”

Yes.

“Then decide what you want.”

And apparently that was enough for me.

I thought about it.

I read.

I analysed.

I considered everything.

And eventually I met him and told him:

I don’t care.

I want to be with you.

I remember the look on his face.

He seemed genuinely surprised.

And we continued.

For a while, it was beautiful.

Not perfect.

But beautiful.

And I loved him.

Then life changed again

Later that year, he had to go back to Italy due to personal reasons.

Our last day together was November 1.

A few days before my birthday.

There was a storm.

Wind.

Rain.

The kind of weather that makes a goodbye feel unnecessarily cinematic.

He gave me a painting.

I still have it in my living room.

Then he left.

We tried distance.

I was going through my own problems.

Money.

Friendships.

Life.

And he wasn’t there.

Eventually, in January 2021, I ended the relationship.

I was devastated.

But this isn’t really an article about what happened next.

That’s another story.

Actually, several.

This is about something I believed before any of it happened.

I thought adulthood would make love safer

Teenage me believed that if she waited long enough, she’d avoid unnecessary heartbreak.

She’d become competent first.

Independent.

Educated.

Responsible.

Self-aware.

Then she’d fall in love.

As if love were the final module of a degree.

Complete everything else first.

Then proceed.

What I didn’t understand was that adulthood doesn’t turn people into completed projects.

Adults are confused.

Adults are scared.

Adults contradict themselves.

Adults love people they aren’t able to build relationships with.

Adults make decisions they later regret.

Adults can care about you deeply and still not be able to give you what you need.

And perhaps the hardest lesson for me:

Another person doesn’t have to behave the way I would behave just because I would behave that way.

That sounds obvious now.

It wasn’t obvious to me then.

I thought maturity meant we’d both be operating with approximately the same manual.

We weren’t.

Nobody is.

I don’t think waiting was a mistake

This is the part where I’m supposed to tell teenage girls:

Go make mistakes.

Fall in love.

Don’t be afraid.

But I don’t think that’s what I want to say.

I understand the girl who waited.

She was trying to protect her future.

She had plans.

She wanted a life bigger than the one she knew.

And she was terrified that one wrong decision could take that away from her.

I don’t want to laugh at her.

I want to hug her.

And say:

Ay, chiquita.

You know so little about life.

Not because she’s stupid.

Because we all do.

I waited until I thought I was ready for love.

Then love arrived and taught me that readiness wasn’t what I thought it was.

Maybe being ready was never about becoming impossible to hurt.

Maybe it wasn’t about choosing perfectly.

Or finding another adult who would behave exactly as I would.

Maybe it was something much less reassuring.

Maybe being ready was never about knowing that I wouldn’t get hurt.

Maybe it was about knowing that if I did, I wouldn’t disappear with it.

And I didn’t.

There were years after this story that would test that sentence much more than I could have imagined.

But that’s for another article.

What if being ready for love doesn’t mean being safe from heartbreak at all?