My Enemies to Lovers story did NOT last.

By Francine J., 22

Credit: The Hating Game, 2021

I was a fiercely competitive student in high school. It seems almost laughable to me now, how I sacrificed my time, the memories I would’ve made, for DECA tournaments and debate. I was a high achieving, yet bland student on paper. I blended in. But I was also the only girl on our varsity debate team, one of my greatest achievements. It was true that in high school, I had a big ego. Not in the way that I peacocked myself around, but in the way that I thought I was always doing everything right, that I would keep doing everything correctly.

But on our team that spent time with one another during lunch, after school, and before school in preparation, there was one boy who I could barely stand. He often talked bad behind my back, and although I did the same, it still cut deep. We butted heads a lot, sometimes screaming at one another (safe to say that neither of us was a “captain” or a “logical leader”). I remember him boasting about his SAT score one day, and this fueled me to do better (I didn’t, but I did put my all into it).

I found him boastful, arrogant, and stupid. I had thought he had found me to be the same, but in my senior year of high school, he asked me if I wanted to go to Prom with him.

I was shocked.

But being naive, I went home that day and considered: was his stubbornness teasing? Was it like a boy pulling on a girl's pigtails? The next day, I told him that yes, I would go to Prom with him. From there, I began to develop feelings. We no longer squabbled, but I spent hours of my summer with him. We began going out, sharing our feelings, having fun. I discovered sides of him I never knew before, although it seemed too sudden, too weird. But he also drew out the worst of me. We fought like crazy when we did, and when he visited me during my first semester of college, he was insanely overprotective.

He didn’t let me go out with my friends, and told me that I had to pick up on the second ring, or he would call the police. He liked to tell my friends about what amazing things he was doing back at his college (which he always called university), and at the end of my freshman year, he made a pass on my roommate.

My roommate, having hated him from the beginning, told me, and it felt like an awakening. He had been my first love, and I had become attached to this “enemies to lovers” trope we had. Looking back, he still made me laugh, and he was handsome to the point where a naive first timer could excuse any behavior. I broke up with him soon afterwards, and it became even worse. He bawled at me on facetime, and even admitted he had cheated on me with a handful of girls, even when he came to visit me at my college. He told me that he still loved me, that he would do better. He told me he had been facing a lot of pressure from home.

I suppose that at this point, my story had stopped being a rom-com, much less an “enemies to lovers” narrative. But here’s the thing. The red flags who see an enemy come out when you date. Some green flags may emerge, but a toxic foundation is not the way to go. It wasn’t for me.