Life Like at the Age

¶ … life like at the age of 19 years old? It is the age of making life choices, time for the realization of plans, dreams and hopes. It is the age of starting evaluating and choosing the person one wants to spend his life with, the time for making a foundation of the future. What is life like for a 19-year-old girl? For a girl it is the age of LOVE, it is the period when most of the young girls want to get married and start up a new family. It is the age when everything is just beginning and in "blossom." At the same time it is a very sensitive stage and dramatic changes can have a high impact on the further self-determination and values of a young girl. The "realignment" of values may "navigate" the whole life situation of a person.

A concrete example can reveal a lot more about the issue than generalization. Therefore it is necessary to talk about a definite situation in the life of a 19-year-old young girl. For instance, a 19-year-old girl who first unexpectedly faces the death of her father gets married to her boyfriend and looses him in a car accident. Do these losses make her values concerning personal relationships change? The answer to this question lies in the differences between her view of personal relationship before and after these misfortunes and losses.

As it has been already mentioned, normally, a 19-year-old girl who has a family and a boyfriend lives her life actively, taking everything she has for granted and just being happy. Her perception of the world is "distorted" with the peculiarity of maximizing her own possibilities and is self-complacent. Personal relationship with a person outside of the family is something she considers to be very important, sometimes letting her family move to the background. At this stage she loosed her father, a man who has created her whole "man perception system," who has always been a male role model for her and what is the most important -- loved her for being who she was. This is a hard "convulsion" for any person, especially a young girl. Family values start occupying a very important place through the evaluation of what she had and what this relationship brought into her life. She starts understanding how important the family is and how it is necessary to have a place where a person can always feel protected and loved.

This point-of-view appears to be the catalyst of her decision to immediately form a family in some way to make a substitution of what she had and to fill in the emptiness in her heart after the death of her father. She changes her situation of social development. All the love the girl had to her father automatically redirects to her husband. She cherishes the relationship she has, considering it to be her shelter and sanctum and once again looses this "handhold." At this point she feels that she has lost everything she had. All the hopes and all the beliefs she possessed are destroyed to their very roots leaving the girl to start it all over again. The realization of her plans fails, the life choice she makes leaves her without any support. Exactly at this moment her values start "mutating," activating the girl's "defensive mechanism." Subconsciously she may even feel offended and disappointed with both of the man she loved for having left her on her own. She feels the unfairness of the occurring events and cannot find a reason to explain. These doubts transform her values in order to save her from getting hurt again.

A personal relationship stops being the source of love, care and being herself but a source of a possible future loss and pain. Her grief transforms into a powerful block whose main goal is self-preservation. Plans for life start completely being based on self-dependence and saving emotions and feelings. The family value is replaced by the value of reliable people around. The fact that she has lost two dearly loved man makes her vulnerable. Her new life motto becomes: " Better to prevent, than to suffer later." She tries not to get emotionally involved, but deeply respects mutual feelings. Before the tragedy personal relationships used to be a source of joy and the realization of her dreams, now it is the source of a possible pain. The thing she values the most is the confidence. The confidence that the man that is next to her will always stays there. It is completely natural that the "discharge" she feels is the protection she needs desperately to cope with her grief. Her other way is setting new goals. These goals concern studying and career plans in the first place. High activity on works makes her feel needed. Her work is very reliable due to her respect towards this personal quality.