By Staff Writer Arianna Zander

“How could you?” My words are ice. Tears decorate Taylor’s brown eyes, and she backs away two inches. Licks her lips, studying her pink nail polish instead of me. “I… I didn’t mean to. You know I’d never hurt you on purpose. I’m your best friend.”

I shake my head, and reach for the door handle. It’s cold, and I feel the shiver all the way to my toes. “No,” I whisper, closing my eyes. “Ex best friend.” (more…)

By RTF Staff Writer Kalli Simmerman

Ever done one of those trust exercises where you fall back and let a friend catch you?

Well I haven’t. It’s not that I don’t trust my friends. I would trust them wholeheartedly with certain things. Such as taking care of my things if I was gone, or handling my money, or my feelings given a certain situation.

However…

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By Staff Writer Stephany Mendia

I have a few guy friends who (I will be honest) are really good looking. They are like brothers to me, and I’ve seen them go through mood swings quicker than even I can! (more…)

By RTF Editor B.J. Hamrick

We interrupt our usually scheduled sarcasm for this brief announcement: Three years ago, my life was forever altered by someone I didn’t know. Someone I thought didn’t exist. Someone I swore had died at birth.

Until I met him.

“Mom,” I announced .2 seconds after I laid eyes on the boy, “I’ve found the man I am going to marry.”

If this seems fast to you, imagine how my mother felt. In one brief second I went from spouting math equations like, “Singleness = happiness and marriage = bondage”, to asking, “Where’s the church and the white dress?” (more…)

By Staff Writer Jennifer Grimes

Dear Callie,

I know you’re going to be confused when I don’t show up at your house this  afternoon and I don’t answer any of your calls. In fact, this is the last email message I’m sending you. Why? Well, it’s a really long story. (more…)

Happy Retro Day! This is for anyone who has moved away from friends or watched their friends leave them behind. (I’ve been there, too.) I hope you find this helpful and encouraging. Enjoy! ~Halee

by RTF Staff Writer Catey Yuen

I’m a social person. I’ve always had a lot of friends since I was really young. But when I moved from California to Colorado two summers ago, all of that changed.

When you’ve lived in the same state your whole life, it’s easy to stay in contact with people. After all, most of the people you know, you’ve known for a while. Almost all of my friends came from the church I’d been going to for years. It required very little for me to meet new people and still hang out with the old ones.

Then we moved and it all changed. (more…)

Hey everybody!

Over the past couple of years we’ve gotten a lot of questions from you guys. Questions about relationships, self-injury, sex, suicide — you name it. Each time we hear from you, we remember why this site is here — because of awesome people like you.

So we just want to remind you that if you have a question, we’d love to hear from you. No topic is off-limits. We would also love to share your question on the site, but you can tell us if you’d rather that we didn’t (we will never share your real name).

So go ahead and unload your problems in the contact box or email us at realteenfaith at gmail.com. Just put “advice” in the subject line.

Drop by every Friday to check out this new feature! Until then, we’re looking forward to your questions!

Halee, BJ, and E.

PS – We’re especially looking for your relationship questions for February!

Last spring I became very good friends with this girl.  We found out that we had the same taste in movies – dorky superhero movies all the way!  Superhero cartoons were also pretty great.  We would hang out and watch a movie, then talk.  Slowly we started doing other stuff together, like meeting to go on walks and just talk.  It was a really nice, really close friendship.  Of course, there are these things called “feelings” that tend to creep in and make a mess out of things.  Through all of our time together I began to have these feelings.  She, on the other hand, did not.

Relationships between guys and girls can be very frustrating at time.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned about relationships it’s that guys have this habit (in general) of falling for our good female friends.  If we spend a lot of time with you girls, hang out with you a lot, there is this good chance that feelings are going to blossom in our hearts.

This girl and I had a lot of talks about where we stood, and what was going on between us.  As we got to talking we learned that there was a lot of miscommunication going on between the two of us.  When we had started hanging out we had a brief convo where we said it was just as friends, and that’s how it had truly started.  That’s not where it had stayed for me, though.  For her, thinking it was only as friends we began to act almost as if we were dating.  After the fact we even both admitted that it felt like we had been dating for a couple weeks.

There’s one thing that we discussed, and would have helped us a lot if we had implemented it earlier.  It’s something I really want to encourage opposite gender friends to do: Limit one on one alone time with friends of the opposite gender!  Girls: spending alone time with guys tends to send them this signal that you’re interested in them, whether intentional or not.  This doesn’t mean that you can’t hang out with them alone on occasion, but I would stress that you’re never alone alone.  If you have a great friend of the opposite gender catch up with them over coffee or something.  Sitting alone in the dark basement with the fireplace burning and talking is not the best idea – it can easily lead to miscommunication – trust me on this one!

I really want to stress that communication is key to any relationship, friendship or otherwise.  Talking about where you stand with someone of the other gender might seem a little awkward at times, but if you don’t feel comfortable sharing your feelings with the person you want to date then perhaps they’re not the person that you should be dating.