I have had crushes ever since I was about four years old, and I became interested in relationships before I should have been even thinking about them. As my mom was aware of this, she told me at an early age that I should not be too “forward” because boys won’t like it. I never really listened to that because it wasn’t in my nature to be passive. Someone who accepts me for who I am would admire that about me.
As a result of my precocious interests, I experienced a lot of rejection before I even set foot in high school. This made me feel like I needed to keep to myself, and not confess my feelings to my crushes. If it’s meant to be, it will happen, I thought. So when my junior year of high school arrived, I started liking another guy but I barely said a word to him. As he was a senior, he graduated that year, and I never saw him again. Although he was known to be blunt and keep to himself, he was also supposedly a kind person once you got to know him, and I never got to know him, which I regretted.
Photo Credit: Girls’ Life
Over time, I learned that whether or not you meet a person who reciprocates your feelings is environmental and dependent on compatibility; you have to be in the right place around the right person at the right time, and this doesn’t usually happen often. If someone doesn’t like you, it just means your personalities don’t work well together and that’s no one’s fault. If your personality causes a person to reject you or turn away, that does not mean you should change who you are or suppress a certain part of your personality. It means they are not the right person for you.
Women are discouraged from romantically taking initiative not only by their family members but by the media as well. In TV shows and movies, women are rarely ever seen to make the first move with their love interest, unless it is a lesbian relationship—and LGBT couples are still, sadly, underrepresented in the media. When women are shown to make the first move, they often have annoying personalities or are clingy, which is not usually the case at all. If the media showed more women of all sexualities taking initiative with the person they like, our society would likely be more accepting of women who some might call “forward”.
Speaking of the word itself, I feel like “forward” has negative connotations when applied to women. Saying that someone is “forward” implies that their advances are unwanted, perhaps pushing the other person away or making them uncomfortable––or at the very least coming on too strong. But there is nothing wrong with a woman who wants to initiate conversation with or respectfully pursue an interest in another person.
As I began to explore relationships more and more, I learned that it is not a bad thing to take initiative if that’s a part of who you are. What is bad is trying to be something you are not. If you prefer that someone approaches you first, then that is completely fine––but if you want to start a conversation and are comfortable doing so, you should definitely go for it.
Cover Photo Credit: inonit.in
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