Is a little chaos actually good for us?
When I think of chaos, I think of my teens.
The mess of first love had me enthralled from age 12 and six months (my first girlfriend), with the cure secured when I first fell into a deep and lasting love six years later. By then, I was 18 and eleven months old. I’ll spare you the dates, but I kept a daily diary as if it were my religion; my prayers each night were replaced by writing up the day.
When I read them back, the chaos of those years makes me laugh and cry. It taught me how to love, who to love (how to make love) and how to make it last.
One Easter was the most chaotic of all. Back from ‘posh prison’, as I liked to call the all-male boarding school I attended, my sixteen-year-old self then had to navigate feelings for girls that were intense, contradictory and often overwhelming. Several girls were occupying my thoughts at once, each representing something different. It was like playing a game of snakes and ladders with my heart, with six counters on the board – all of them me. Yes, I had my teen eye on six girls. Would one be the ‘one’? One would do. A ‘proper’ girlfriend. When we held hands, we meant it – that kind of girl, for keeps.
At the time, I experienced this not as a learning process but as self-inflicted chaos – everything I did made it worse. One day, I might feel convinced that I had found true love. The next encounter or letter would throw everything into question. A photograph could occupy my thoughts for days. A chance meeting could alter my mood for a week. If I took a phone call (I dodged a few) the ensuing conversation could change everything. Silence can feel devastating.
I was supposed to be revising for exams in June; I set aside a few hours in the morning for it. Afternoons, evenings and weekends were for ‘love’.
The look, the clothes, the tan from using a sun lamp, the right product in my hair – it all mattered. In Newcastle this meant Saloon66 and Marcus Price, or the Kard-Bar, or even Isaac Waltons. It depended on who I was seeing that afternoon or evening. As did the order of songs played at the Rugby Club Discos, and the timing of the all-important ‘slow one’. And if we could have a date to see a film as a couple, or in a group.
The diaries reveal how seriously I took all of this. Teenage feelings are often dismissed by adults as temporary or immature. Yet when I read my own words, I am reminded that nothing felt temporary. Everything felt important. Every emotional development mattered enormously. I was hungry for it, and I ate it up. One girl admonished me, saying I was ‘in love with the idea of being in love’. I was; I am.
What strikes me now is the chaos.
I was trying to be loyal while remaining curious. I was attracted to different qualities in different people. I wanted excitement, companionship, romance, admiration and understanding, often without recognising that these were unlikely to be found in the same person. But I was a believer, unlike my mum, who said that if I was always looking for perfection, I’d never find it. A girl isn’t a shopping list. I was a teenager, of course, I didn’t listen. She had to like Bowie, not David Soul. I’ll spare you the list.
I was discovering that human relationships are complicated because human beings thrive in chaos, however much we crave stability. Chaos is the crucible. It’s where dreams are made.
At sixteen, attraction arrives before wisdom. Stuff emotional maturity! Feelings seek out experience. The heart races ahead while judgement can go hang. Looking back, I can see that I was trying to answer questions that every adolescent confronts:
- What does love feel like?
- How do I know that what I am feeling is real?
- Does she feel it in the same way?
- Can I be in love with more than one person at the same time?
- What responsibilities do urges create?
- How do my choices affect other people?
- What sort of young man do I want to become?
- How does sex fit into this?
The girls themselves mattered enormously, of course. I loved them all (and love them still). They were real people with their own hopes, fears and expectations. Yet fifty years on, I can also see that each relationship represented a different possibility. Each brought out a different aspect of my personality. Through them, I was exploring not only who they were, but who I might be. And my willingness to mould myself into their ‘perfect man’. Several times, the shoe would not fit. I prefer to be barefoot rather than wear green wellies or polished brogues.
The diary entries are compelling. You gloss over the detail in time; you mythologise and let some events fade. The diary tells you otherwise; it is a witness. The entire genre is not merely stories about teenage romance. They are a record of identity formation.
When I reread them today, I see a young man making mistakes, changing his mind, idealising people, misreading situations, hurting feelings and occasionally having his own feelings hurt in return. Yet I also see somebody learning. Weren’t we all? Did we all find happiness? I’m sure most of us did. I know so!
Without the chaos, would I have learned anything meaningful about relationships? I didn’t want to make the mistakes my parents made – they separated when I was eight and divorced when I was ten. And by the time I was sixteen, my father was twice married and twice divorced and looked as confused as I was. I’d even seen him in tears; love hurts.
So, without competing emotions, would I have understood the difference between attraction and affection, fantasy and reality, desire and commitment?
Without uncertainty, would I have developed any emotional maturity at all? I wanted a ‘proper’ girlfriend. And it needed to happen that Easter. Call me desperate? I was sixteen. Love matters!
The thousands of diary entries suggest that a certain amount of chaos is not an obstacle to development but one of its essential ingredients. Not destructive chaos, nor the sort that overwhelms a person completely, but the manageable turbulence that accompanies growth.
Looking back across half a century, I find myself grateful for that confusion. At the time, it felt uncomfortable and bewildering. Now I can see it as part of the apprenticeship of becoming an adult.
The teenage affairs of the heart that filled so many diary pages were never distractions – they were life and the means by which I learned about empathy, responsibility, longing, disappointment, hope and self-knowledge.
Looking back now, I realise that the chaos was not a side effect of adolescence. It was adolescence. The chaos was the lesson.
Easter 1978 felt like chaos in real time. Fifty years later, I can see that it was really an education disguised as a romantic disaster.
At sixteen, I imagined I was choosing between girls. In truth, they were each teaching me something different about myself.
As for the girls? Well, there was Fenella, the safest and most serious. Church-going, thoughtful, slightly mysterious behind her brace and careful manners. She represented possibility. With Fenella, I learned that longing can be built as much from imagination as from reality. Much of what I felt for her lived in letters, hopes and projections. She was one future.
Julie-Anne belonged to an earlier chapter. We’d met at ages fourteen and thirteen. We had history, shared family friend circles and familiar ground. She reminded me that affection and nostalgia are not the same thing as love. Looking back, she was a bridge between childhood and adolescence rather than a destination.
Then there was Cece. We met that first week. A taller Audrey Hepburn – glamorous and unattainable. She was the girl who turned fantasy into reality with a kiss. Cece taught me that romance becomes far more complicated once it stops being theoretical. It is easy to dream about a girl. It is much harder when she likes you back as strongly as you like her. Only this all came a bit too late!
Helen was gentle and had good timing. We never had enough of either. She appeared and disappeared with the reliability of parental curfews and a father with a pair of binoculars. If he was collecting her at 10.00 am, he was there a few minutes early. Every time. Helen taught me that some relationships are defined by circumstance as much as by feeling. Not every connection is meant to become a grand affair.
If Cece represented romance, Tracey represented chaos itself. Clever, competitive, provocative and impossible to ignore, she understood emotional power long before I did. Tracey challenged every assumption I held about attraction. She turned courtship into a game of strategy, forcing me to confront jealousy, vanity and indecision. Through Tracey, I discovered that desire and compatibility are not the same thing. We both had oodles of desire and made the time and space to play. She told her mum I was teaching her how to play squash. I booked the court, but we never made it over.
Donna was different again. Calm where others were turbulent, mature where the rest of us were improvising. Donna saw through the drama. She taught me that kindness is often less exciting than turmoil. We slept together – as in we fell asleep in the same bed. No more. There was intimacy in that. Trusting me to behave even if I didn’t want to. I swore not to say anything, and didn’t, until now.
And then there was India, already looking beyond Newcastle towards London and a larger world. India reminded me that people have ambitions, trajectories and destinations of their own. We learnt a lot from each other – knowing we’d never see each other again. I was beginning to understand the physical side of a relationship and how much fun it is. If I’d been looking for a certain kind of human biology practical, that was it; Shere Hite would have been proud, she provided the reference book.
At the time, that Easter holiday felt bewildering. One girl represented a hopeless crush, another, nostalgia; another, Christian romance; another, platonic friendship; another, daring temptation; another, escape; and one gave me a precious scarf. Together, they formed a psychological and physiological proving ground.
The lesson was not which girl to choose.
The lesson was understanding who I was becoming. The chameleon would have to settle eventually, and with that would come the right match – or so I theorised.
The chaos was not a mistake. It was the mechanism by which adolescence transformed uncertainty into understanding. Fifty years later, I can see that every one of those girls played a part in that process. They were on the journey.
Adults often remember adolescence as a simpler time. The diary I kept suggests the opposite. The world may have been smaller, but emotionally, it was bewildering. Every choice was consequential. Every relationship generated questions. Every possibility created new uncertainties.
I wanted to be honourable.
I wanted to be loved.
I wanted to choose wisely.
I didn’t want to hurt anybody.
I wanted excitement. Of course.
I wanted certainty as well.
The difficulty was that these desires frequently collided. Sometimes with parents. Sometimes with geography. Often with schedules.
Reading the diaries now, I see a young man saying ‘yes’ to everyone and everything, against a deadline to return to boarding school at the end of April after just four weeks at home; he’d not be let out again or have any female company for a further eleven weeks. These were desperate times – chaos was inevitable, they were rapids to ride or drown trying.
I see a young man trying to discover what love is and what it is not. It had two components described in two words: intimacy (of body and soul) and trust.
The process was messy. There were misunderstandings, misplaced hopes, emotional contradictions and occasional hurt feelings. Yet all of it seems necessary now. None of those lessons could have been learned from books, films, or adult advice. They had to be lived.
That is why I have come to think differently about chaos.
The emotional turbulence of Easter 1978 was not a failure of judgement. It was the mechanism by which judgement was formed.
The diaries preserve that process in real time. They capture a young man pulled in different directions by affection, attraction, fantasy, loyalty, curiosity and hope. They record mistakes and misconceptions. They also record growth.
If I learned anything from Easter 1978, it is that the heart develops through confusion as much as through certainty.
The chaos was not evidence that something had gone wrong.
The chaos was evidence that something important was happening.
And, by the way, that Easter holiday, bookmarked by boys in smart Tweed jackets and school ties boarding a bus to take them back to boarding school over 90 miles away, one of these girls pushed through the parents and siblings waving us off, to pause the bus, call me to her, wrap her arms around my neck, and declare her undying love.
And how long did that last? Let’s say girls talk. And I could do nothing about it, shut away in a boarding school 96 miles away on the opposite side of the Pennines.
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