I’m re-watching Dan In Real Life (great Steve Carrell movie) and, when the teenaged (14? year old?) daughter tells her dad that she’s in love with a guy after knowing him for three weeks, he tells her it isn’t real love. But to someone that age, it is. I don’t get how so many parents are so out-of-touch with their kids. They act like *they *were never 14. I’m only 27, but I remember 14 *very *well. This can’t just be a generational thing. Pretty much everybody was madly in love with somebody at 14. Possibly even several somebodies in succession… right? I remember falling in teen love with three guys my freshman year of high school. Not that I dated any of them, but you know. It’s just a teen thing.
I know this is mundane, pointless, and unforgivably brief… but that’s all I got for now.
I haven’t seen the movie but from your description it sounds like the father was telling his daughter the truth. He was telling her that it’s not real love just because it feels like it to her. He wasn’t forgetting what it’s like to be a teenager; he’s remembering it. Being a good parent doesn’t mean telling your child what they want to hear. You’ve got to tell them what they need to hear.
It depends on what you mean by “real love.” What a parent should say is this: In the vast majority of cases, the person you fall in love with at 14 is not the person that you will stay with the rest of your life. That doesn’t mean that what you feel isn’t real. Indeed, it may be affecting you emotionally more than any future love affair will, even if that future love affair is the one that you will stay in for the rest of your life. Strong emotion doesn’t necessarily imply a permanent relationship. Enjoy being 14, but don’t think that you already know everything there is to know about life.
My mom was the best at not understanding how a teenager thinks. For her it wasn’t even that she didn’t remember, because she was just such a *good *teenager that she really never even experienced a lot of it, and she expected my sisters and me to be the same, which none of us were. When my little sister had a crush on a boy, my mom would tell her, in an “oh aren’t you silly” tone, that no, she’s not old enough to like boys. Super effective for a girl who’s trying to be older. And the more we fought against her, the more she thought that the problem was that she just wasn’t being strict enough. Our teenage years were hell for all three of us, and for our mom.
I never did think I was “in love” though. I liked boys and all, even fixated on them, but even then I was an anti-romantic.
But how is it at all helpful to tell someone who is absolutely convinced they’re in love (by dint of hormones and inexperience) that they’re not? That’s mere contradiction, even if there’s truth in it. It’s more likely to alienate the child than to help them. Anyone who’s BEEN a teen (so, all of us here) knows that teens lack perspective. It’s not an issue of fault, but of cerebral development. If you tell a child they’re too young to understand or do something, you reinforce their desire to rebel like *nothing *else can.
I think a better tactic would be to refrain from contradicting the statement (which is entirely valid, considering their point of reference), but to maintain boundaries because they’re not allowed to do certain things (whether because it’s illegal, or against house rules). You can respect your kid’s declaration of puppy-love without allowing them to be in a locked bedroom with their boyfriend, you know?
Like with a lot of things parents say to their children, its’ less to do with convincing them then and there than giving them a point for reflection after the fact. I’ve always thought of it in terms of paving the way for when the teenager turns 20 and is finally ready to accept that his parents weren’t clueless idiots. (When they’re hopefully more willing to listen to their parents’ advice regarding the really important things, like finances, mortgages and having their own kids.)
I don’t think I’ve met a parent who’s under the impression that he or she can dispel teen wuv with mere parental eye-rolling.
Plus it could be the love of their lives; many people who married their HS sweetheart are still happily married many decades later. Dad’s dead, but my parents met when she was 14 and he 17, and they were a better match than many; many of my HS friends are married to the person with whom they used to make goo eyes across the classroom, and it’s been about 20 years since those weddings (they got married after college, not after HS).
I’ve been 14 years old. And what I needed to hear was that everyone gets incredibly intense crushes around this time, and most of the time these crushes don’t last, even though an unrequited crush can be extremely painful.
I also needed to hear that I would be allowed to date sometime in the next couple of years, not that I wouldn’t be allowed to date until I was at least 18, but I didn’t hear that, either.
This. I’ve been together with my teenage boyfriend for over 11 years. Was it not real back then? Has it changed to become real? Or was it always real, but only because it proved to last?
What does all that mean at all? Who do you think you are if you are judging what another person feels? Why on earth would you know anything at all about the feelings they are experiencing? Just because you now judge the feelings you had when you were a teenager to be “not real love” does not mean you get to say that about anyone else. It’s incredibly disrespectful, besides being totally irrelevant to the person in question.
The feelings are real, but that doesn’t mean the love is.
I don’t remember the movie well enough to remember whether he was denying her feelings, or just telling her not to put too much stock in them, but if it was the latter, I don’t see anything wrong with that.
A parents job is not to tell a teenager what they want to hear. They aren’t forgetting, they are adding perspective - as you said yourself “maybe several someones.” They are trying to assure their child that they are normal and they will get over it, even if it feels that the world is going to end.
Your fourteen year old friends help you wallow over your twu luv. Your parents job is to pull you out of the wallow - it isn’t the most sympathetic role…but shortly after you bring them home from the hospital, you realize that sympathy isn’t going to be sufficient to turn children into adults.
Frankly, it would be a lot easier to join in the wallow. If you think back to being fourteen, you can probably come up with a few of your friend’s parents who “really did understand.” And I’m guessing that they took a little longer to grow up - because their parents hadn’t. (Not always, but often).
I will also add that most teens don’t have the maturity or the skills to make a relationship work so it lasts, or who have the foresight to want to make it work in the first place. They (well, girls do; I can’t speak for the boys) see relationships as a fantasy where everything is always perfect and they’ll have a little house and kids and a white picket fence and a dog and they’ll live happily ever after. For me, anyway, the breakup of a relationship (not that I had many) had more to do with the death of the fantasy than the end of the relationship. But that comes with maturity and perspective.
My daughter is only 5 months old and I am already starting to work out how to discuss love with her when she is older. I already know that I won’t truly be able to explain to her what love is because it is something you really can’t understand until you’ve experienced it yourself but I will make sure she knows there is a difference between love and lust, love and control, and love and romance. I will make sure she knows that if someone loves you that they don’t push you to do things you aren’t comfortable with and they do things with your safety and happiness in mind and that when you love someone you do the same for them. I will make sure she knows that love is a powerful thing and that there are people in this world who will pretend to love you to take advantage of that if you let them. I will have these discussions with her starting from a fairly young age so that she can grasp these concepts before hormones start convincing her that some guy having nice pecs is love.
This way when she meets some guy (or girl) she decides she is “in love” with at 12 years old and I say something like, “You can’t know you’re in love after only 3 days” or whatever she can say, “You just don’t understand what I’m going through!” and storm off to her room but the seeds of understanding will have already been sown long before and she will hopefully not be convinced that having sex is necessary to prove you love someone or that it is okay to let someone hurt you as long as they say they love you. I’m planning this out now because I do remember what it is like to be a teenager and I don’t want her to have to experience some of the horrible stuff my friends and classmates went through while navigating through their emotions for the first time.
Almost every parent remembers what it was like being a teenager. Many of them won’t have these kinds of discussions with their kids because they will be embarrassed or they won’t have the words to put their thoughts into coherent phrases but that doesn’t mean they don’t remember, just that they didn’t get a manual with their baby letting them know to have these conversations before too much time passed.
(1) A nitpick: It was three days, not three weeks.
(2) Not everyone had the glorious, romantic teen years as depicted in the movies. Some of us were such outcasts that “falling in love” and crushes weren’t even on our radar. We were just trying not to get picked on and beaten up. Perhaps Dan was one of those.
I am 34. I remember things that happened to me when I was 14, but I certainly don’t remember what it was like. I’ve certainly reinterpreted my life several times since then. No doubt you think you haven’t, but I don’t believe you.
Perhaps when my son is a teenager, it will be my job to convince him that he is not nearly as vulnerable as he thinks he is should be he subject to such infatuation.
I’ll let you know how it goes. Currently my daughter is 12, this is the approach we’ve taken, and she scoffs at the “boy crazy” girls she goes to school with, I’m hoping that part of it is because of the prep we’ve done.
She’s also in Unitarian sex-ed right now, and its been very educational - and not in the public school sex-ed way. The girls have communicated that the right time for sex is “after they’ve been dating a while, when they are in love, and where there is mutual respect - and birth control” - the boys communicated that it was “when they were drunk.”
My son however, him I’m more worried about - because he’s a boy. I don’t think there is the emotional “twu luv” for him - but there is the insane teenaged sex drive.
If there’s one thing that romantic comedies have taught me, it’s that you have to go for it. If you’re in love with her, just stalk her 24/7 until she gives in and realizes she’s also in love with you.