Katherine Fan shares about how timing plays a role in finding love.
I was recently having coffee with high school parents. After the long application season, the uncertainty was finally over. The kids and parents could finally exhale. One mother shared her concern. Her son had been dating the same girl for two years. Now came the question no one talks about: what happens next?
As a pediatrician, child psychiatrist and parent of a teenager myself, I realized this is one of those deeply important questions that almost never gets discussed out loud.
Maybe because it seems too ordinary. Too personal. In Chinese philosophy, there is a phrase: 天時地利人和 — the harmony of timing, place and people. Timing comes first and this is the one we control the least. I know this because I lived it myself. I went to college with a serious high school boyfriend. We were certain we would last forever. My husband also had a serious high school relationship — they even attended the same college.
Both ended in spectacular heartbreak. Life has its own strange timing. My husband and I met in high school. We lost touch, built separate lives, and found each other again thirteen years later. So perhaps, this is what I wish someone had told me then: College is not just an education. It is a chance to experience new things, meet new people and discover who we are.