(Can’t believe I’m giving dating advice to a 14 year old…) I was in the same boat as you at your age. As I look back on my high school years I realize that the main reason was that I lacked confidence. If you want to date, start asking girls to date. To go out for a coffee/soda. For a bike ride. To a show. I realize you go to an all boys school, but search out where coed hangouts occur. Parks, teen clubs, wherever. Start talking to coed groups and after you get to know a girl, ask her out. Just be prepared to get “No” for an answer. Eventually, someone will say, “Yes,” and you’ll be able to build on your experience - positive and negative.
What’s more, Romeo and Juliet wouldn’t be legally allowed to be married, without parental authorization, in any US state. (Or in Spain, for that matter.)
As I’m sure @Wendell_Wagner is aware, a “Romeo and Juliet law” is intended to protect sexually active minor teenage couples from legal penalties for statutory rape if one of them is under the age of consent. Not to confer on them a right to get married without parental or judicial authorization as the original Romeo and Juliet did.
Ah, sorry, @Wendell_Wagner may have been aware, but I was not. It’d been decades since I read any Shakespeare, and it was only the Cliffnotes version, at that.
Say, @SaSaLeLe2011, do they even still teach Romeo and Juliet in school (in any country)?
It was already common to teach Romeo and Juliet in the freshman year of high school in the U.S. when the parents of Baby Boomers were in high school, so reading Romeo and Juliet was common among the people who caused the birth rate to increase for the only time in the twentieth century.
(To be fair, and a bit more serious, a lot of the spike in the teen birth rate in the 1950s was caused by pregnancies among teenagers who were legally married with parental consent. In 1960 the median age at first marriage for women was about 20, meaning that nearly half of all first-time brides were literally teenagers. So that’s not really the same thing as the much-lamented “teen pregnancy epidemic” among unmarried teens of subsequent decades, which is what I was jokingly suggesting that the dire warning of R&J was intended to combat.)
Birth control pills were approved (to be sold in the U.S.) by the FDA in 1960. In 1962, 1.2 million American women were using.them. By the early 1970s, it was pretty standard for college women (married or unmarried) to know that you had to be using birth control pills if there was a significant chance you would be having sex in the next month. Even if you didn’t think that you had a significant chance of having sex in the next month, even the chance of being raped gave you a reason to use them. The percentage (of American woman) who had unmarried teenage births peaked in 1957. The percentage is now less than one-third of the percentage in 1957.
Did you go to a school where the teacher and the other students spoke English? Did you have courses at that school for English speakers to learn to speak Arabic? If so, how well did you learn to speak Arabic?
I challenge your assertion here. I was a young woman in high school and college during those years. No one was taking birth control pills to prevent pregnancy in case they were raped. BC pills were hard to get unless you were married and your husband approved, they were expensive, no one was pursuing them and taking and enduring the side effects just in case of rape.
What can I say? At the college I attended from 1971 to 1974, it was assumed (correctly or incorrectly) that any couple who were “romantically” involved were having sex. I never heard anyone discuss abortion. There were certainly people there who weren’t having sex, but none of them were boasting about the fact that they would never have sex outside of marriage. Having sex wasn’t a big thing to discuss really.
