It’s wrong if you’re the parent, perfectly acceptable if you’re the 15 year old.
I wasn’t made aware before your post that it was “ridiculously creepy” to take precautions with my own personal health, and to consider a source who *wants to be in my pants *to be a less than objectively honest source, especially if there is information involved which would contraindicate my willingness to let them into said pants posthaste.
Knowing my husband’s adventures before he met me, I required him to have a checkup and was present when he opened his results before I even let him cuddle overnight with me. We’re married now, so apparently he’s attracted to creeps.
:rolleyes:
Yeah, the other suggestions are great, but this one is a bit oogy [edit: the oogy part is where she’s asking the girlfriend’s family and friends to tell her about girlfriend’s sexual history]. As an alternative, she and the girlfriend could go to a free clinic together and have blood tests done together and be present for the sharing of results–what I did with my first adult girlfriend.
As for the emotional consequences of sex:
- They’re real;
- They’re survivable;
- They’re inevitable.
Virtually everyone gets fucked up by the aftermath of their first love. That’s awful, and that’s okay. I’d want to say something like this to the kid:
“Tons of people are totally certain that their first love will last a lifetime. Of the people who are totally certain that it’ll last forever, most of them are wrong. Your certainty is no guarantee; on the contrary, the more certain you are that it’ll last forever, the worse it’s likely to hurt when and if it doesn’t.”
And then be there for her when it falls apart, as it’s almost certain to do. Unless she or the girlfriend is seriously unhinged (and that sounds really unlikely from what you’ve said), she’ll go through some serious, survivable pain at some point, and she’ll learn some important lessons from that pain that’ll serve her well in future relationships, lessons that I really don’t think there’s any other way to learn.
Allow me to suggest that any quizzing on STD’s be done verbally and not in some weird term paper.
Ditto for asking her GF about previous partners. That is an unpleasant conversation to have with your partner, let alone your parents.
Tell your daughter that you’ll be quizzing her about it at some point in the next month, and that should she be found wanting in responses, you’ll not discuss these rules again for three months at a minimum. Pop the quiz on her after a few weeks. See how she does.
Calling your beau’s exes and family to grill them about sexual history is very very creepy. I can’t imagine what it would be like to receive one of those calls.
And yeah, getting a STD test before even cuddling is really weird as well.
Which is it? These are contradictory descriptions.
Do you live in the sticks, or in a suburban neighbourhood?
They were able to spend time alone in my daughter’s room and downstairs in the basement. They weren’t completely alone in the house, but they weren’t under close supervision, either. The doors needed to be open at all times, though, so they knew that somebody could walk in on them at any time.
Suburban neighborhood.
He had a very well established reputation for being very persuasive. I was much less experienced than he was, and I wasn’t about to be in a situation where he could take advantage of me when I was all heated up and wanting more.
I know that I can be very impulsive (sometimes in really inappropriate or unsafe ways) when I’m wrapped up in something that I enjoy or feel passionately about, so it makes perfect sense to me. I wanted to look at the possibilities and take steps to assure *myself *that when I got to that point with him, everything that I could do to be safe had already been done and I didn’t need to worry about it in the moment, so I could relax and be passionate and impulsive and not worry about the consequences - the worry part was already done with and out of the way.
I’ll totally cop to weird - I’m cool with that. I know I’m weird, and that I have some very odd personal habits which have been developed to counteract my weirdnessess.
I was surprised by the creepy label. People lie. They really do. All the time. Sometimes it’s willful ignorance, sometimes it’s plain unintended ignorance, and sometimes they flat-out deceive you. I find it hard to just believe people when they make statements about things that are really important.
If you’re just going to blindly believe someone on every subject, then that’s your choice, but I don’t think it’s creepy to check with mutual friends or their family if you are on speaking terms - “Do you think Marie was sleeping with her old girlfriend Candace?”
Is that really a creepy question? I’m not talking about phone stalking or obsessive focus, but yeah - I totally talked to mutual friends about my husband’s exploits when we were dating - I wanted to know what he had been up to, and whether he was being honest about it all. Turns out he was, but I don’t think it was creepy to ask our mutual friends about it as a topic of conversation. Lord knows we talked about everyone else’s sex lives too! 
(bolded for emphasis)
Yes, there is a huge difference between quizzing “mutual friends” and inquiring of total strangers. Expecting strangers to tell you about someone else’s fuck history is SUPER CREEPY. Personally I wouldn’t call anyone my friend that would discuss my sexual history with some random person they didn’t know. The OP’s daughter and the girlfriend don’t have any mutual friends. They met at summer camp and are geographically separated.
So that’s “not alone enough for making out”
Then they weren’t going to be making out outside, either.
Basically, if you haven’t really allowed the privacy for just making out, then when they do get a chance at some privacy, restraint is going to fly out the window, IMO.
Lasciel isn’t trying to be creepy, but imagine this situation:
Phone: Hello?
Daughter: Hi, this isn’t Bergkamp’s daughter. My dad said that before I had sex with your 17-year-old ex-girlfriend, I had to tell him about her sexual history. Could you tell me how far you went with her, so I can tell dad?
It obviously wouldn’t go down QUITE that creepily, but there’s a huge difference between, of your own volition, asking mutual friends about what your beau/belle has been up to in the past, and asking strangers this question on assignment from your dad. The former is totally fine and is one of those great uses of gossip; the latter is totally creepy.
… and we had sex. Yeah,we got caught too. By her mom and dad. -sigh-
It’s what they / we do. I don’t throw up my hands and just ruefully accept the fact. I didn’t have to- neither kid was sexually active at 15 or 16 in my house. But if they had been, I’d have been primarily concerned about disease and consent / pressured situations.
If you don’t wind up with a nightmare, you wind up with a guy / gal who… who also has strong feelings and wants to explore them with you in a safe happy passionate way. Hopefully not in a cornfield. The world is not entirely populated with victims who had no choice and for whom the memory of sex at 15 is a terror.
How they come to a decision with that partner, and why they come to a decision to proceed, and how safe they are is more important to me than if they do at all.
And, chances are high that their kid is gonna turn out GAY!
We’re going to have to agree to disagree on whether that’s “alone enough for making out.” For certain definitions of “making out,” I believe it is (for example, I think it’s enough for kissing and cuddling, certainly, and quite possible a few things beyond that).
This is a good place for me to make a point that has been going through my head this morning (and is not especially directed at you, MrDibble): While I have no problem discussing those kinds of parenting decisions, including whether the rules we put in place prior to the visit were fair and/or reasonable, that’s not the purpose of the thread, for a couple of reasons.
First, they’re very context-heavy. Unless someone knows my family very, very well, their opinions on such matters have very little value to me–they’re not worthless, necessarily, but not particularly valuable, either. I suppose a collection of them helps serve as a general benchmark, but that’s probably it.
Second, despite my angst over how to advance the ball in this particular situation, I am actually very comfortable with the decisions my wife and I have made up to this point, including our decisions to keep the girls in separate bedrooms and require the basement and bedroom doors to stay open. Again, I’m happy to discuss them, I know reasonable people can disagree about them, and the rules for you and/or your kids may be different. But for my family, at the moment, I’m not second-guessing any of those decisions. I’m not looking for affirmation, nor am I looking for criticism of them. Could we be more permissive? Certainly. We could also be much more restrictive. For now, we’re happy with the balance we’ve struck, even though the results have not been perfect.
The reason for the thread, and what’s up for discussion at my house, is whether we should modify this one particular position going forward.
I appreciate any and all contributions to the thread, so by all means, please continue to contribute, even if what you want to contribute touches on the decisions that have already been made. It’s been very helpful so far. But what’s most helpful is a general discussion of the pros and cons of becoming sexually active around the age of 15.
I don’t mean to be brusque or offend anyone; I’m as guilty as anyone of taking this discussion down those other roads. And if anyone still wants to discuss those things, we can. But, if possible, I’d like to refocus the conversation on the original question.
Untrue. Both herpes and bacterial vaginosis are fairly easily transmitted in female-on-female sex. Cite.
For now, at a minimum, I’m thinking my daughter should have a candid discussion with her girlfriend about past sexual activity. Has she ever had sex before? Has she ever had it with a boy? Has she ever been tested for any STDs? I don’t need (or especially want) to know the answers to those questions, but I want to know that my daughter has asked them and gotten answers.
That’s totally reasonable.
Ok, if you give me a few minutes I’ll talk about my experiences as a girl.
Or worse yet, they might both get pregnant.
Okay, then – let me talk a little bit about my experiences as a girl who had sex the first time at 15 ½. This would have been in ~1986.
The fellow who I was dating at the time was my third boyfriend, and he was 18 – it was his first time too. He did not pressure me at all (I realize that I’m quite lucky there). As a matter of fact, I recall that I was in fact a bit more enthusiastic about “going all the way” than he was – I definitely remember being the first one to bring it up as a possibility, and shocking him by doing so. But then, he was Catholic.
Most of the early sexual activity (and, in fact, The Deed itself) happened in the back seat of his parents’ station wagon.
I didn’t tell my parents before we started Having Sex, but I did tell them a month or so later that we were “planning on Doing It” after his prom, so that I would get the OK to stay out all night (he got a hotel room), and so that they’d drive me to Planned Parenthood to get BC. So even though they didn’t know beforehand, they knew shortly after.
My folks were pretty much the opposite of Even Sven’s about this – when they knew we were having sex, they were OK with him staying overnight in my room on non-school nights. (I was also a latchkey kid, so there was a lot of time for fooling around before they got home from work.)
There weren’t a lot of emotional repercussions from the relationship for me – I was the one that broke it off, because I had met someone else. He was pretty devastated, though, and got kinda creepy and stalker-ish for a while. I don’t think he’d have taken it that badly if we hadn’t been physically involved.
We used condoms religiously until I got on the pill, and only stopped then because we figured it was safe to since we were both each other’s first. (Note: in 1986, the awareness of STDs was HUGE, AIDS was devastating the nation and everyone was VERY careful about using condoms.)
Honestly, given my situation, my personality, and so on, I don’t think it was a mistake for me to be active that young – though I don’t think waiting would have been a mistake either. The opportunity was there, I wanted it, and I took it.
Does that help any? Honestly, she sounds like a kid with her head screwed on pretty straight. As long as there’s no coercion I don’t see a problem with her sleeping with her GF at this point. The breaking of the rules is of course an Issue, and I do agree that you need to talk to her about the fact that this is unlikely to be a Forever Relationship (though be prepared for some backlash on that point – teen girls especially tend to be convinced that whoever they’re dating is THE ONE) and so on, as others have said.