I Don't Want to be in Love

     I think I've come to a major realization about the influence music had on my middle-school self.  I am almost positive that a great contributor to my cynicism about all relationships at the teenage level is the renowned band Good Charlotte.  Good Charlotte and their chart-topping song "I Don't Wanna Be In Love", that is. 
      Hear me out: in 7th grade the catholic middle schools would all congregate for dances and they'd be just long enough to get through the cleaner (or I guess the apropriate term would be less inappropriate) Top 40 songs.  "I Don't Wanna Be In Love" made it on that list for the majority of the year.  7th grade was also the time of my first "boyfriend".  Even though it was strictly a talk-on-the-phone-every-day-but-no-contact-outside-of-that relationship, to the rest of my friends and me it was as legitimate as it got.
     What does any of this have to do with my cynicism?  Well we broke up (shocker of all shockers, right?) and I realized that I needed to not care, especially not in front of my friends.  Now don't get me wrong, the amount that I genuinely did care was not very much but just enough to want to hide it.  My favorite song at that time was, of course, that little Good Charlotte diddy I always heard at dances.  There's a line in that song that goes "We break-up, it's something that we do now.  Everyone has got to do it sometime, it's all right, let it go, get out there and find someone."  and that became my mantra.  That's what I would tell my friends whenever they asked if I was sad (or for the cattier friends, when they tried to point out how sad I should be). 
      I guess I clung to that a little too intensely in my head and somewhere along the line those words became law.  Everyone had to brake up eventually and when they do it shouldn't be sad, they should get out there asap.  When that song becomes your bible at a young age I guess it's hard to shake it off as you get older and not everyone breaks-up.  I'm not saying that's the only, only, only reason I'm cynical, but it definitely didn't help.  Interesting how something as silly as a pop-song could help shape someone...