Guys Feel Lust Not Love

Photo illustration by Barry Langer / VOX Staff

By Raven Hathcock / VOX Staff

L-O-V-E is a four-letter word that takes on so many meanings. To many of us girls, it is all we ever want — to eventually meet the perfect partner, fall in love and live happily ever after. In our teen years, we just want someone to be there for us — as a friend and hopefully as someone who will love us romantically — but it seems like few guys want to commit to such a relationship.

I don’t think that most teenage guys are looking for love. What they want is sex, and they’re willing to suffer through what girls want in a relationship as long as they think they’re going to get sex. They’ll even say they love us to get what they want, and when they do, they rarely mean it.

OK, I don’t want to be one of those girls who are all bitchy and say that all guys are pigs, because there are a lot of guys out there who genuinely want a real relationship and have the capacity of falling love. But it’s hard for us to know if we’re dating one of these guys, or one of those only capable of lust. This is what makes it so hard for us girls to trust whoever we’re dating. We want to think “He’s the one.” But in the back of our minds is the nagging voice that screams, “He’s lying!”

I’ve grown up with a mother who is totally against the men who take advantage of women. She isn’t against men; after all, she has been married for 20 years and has two sons. She thinks that girls need to take more power in dating, and not succumb to guys’ demands. It’s probably because she has worked in high schools for so long and she sees how so many teenage boys act like low-down dirty dogs. She works in the counselor’s office and sees so many girls come in sobbing with snot running down their faces because some guys have broken their hearts. Sometimes it’s worse than just a broken heart — she tells me she can’t believe all of the girls who seek help because they’ve gotten pregnant.

I had my first experience dealing with male lust when I was only 11 years old. Yep, the lying can start as early or even earlier than that. It happened when I was living in Mississippi, and let’s just say that he was very good looking and all the girls in my school wanted to go out with him. Of course, he loved to be wanted, too. For some reason, he chose to go with me.

We were boyfriend-girlfriend for about three weeks before he started pressuring me to do things that I didn’t want to do — things that I would rather not specifically mention.

I told him no, and immediately after I rejected him, he decided to go off with my best friend. I found out this out when another one of my friends walked in on them doing some of those things together, and of course I broke up with him immediately. He obviously only wanted a slut, and I guess he thought I was one after only dating me for three weeks. I had no idea that an 11-year-old boy could act like this, and my experience with him has forever changed the way I look at relationships with boys.

That was more than three years ago, and I’m still hurting from the way he treated me.

I’m 15 now and I don’t have high hopes that I’ll find a loving relationship with a boy anytime soon. But that’s want I want, so I keep looking. I want those special feelings of excitement and joy that come with being in love, and somewhere down the road I hope I find my soulmate. But in the meantime I have to watch out for guys who just want to “hit it and quit it.”

As I’ve gotten older and moved into high school, unfortunately these low-down dirty dogs are the majority of the guys I see these days. And because of the experience I had when I was 11, and because of the experiences of other girls I see heartbroken nearly everyday, I can’t help but pay close attention to that voice in the back of my head that says to not trust guys in matters of L-O-V-E especially when I know that most spell it L-U-S-T.

Raven is a freshman at Riverdale High.