Recently, I was consulting with a friend whose teenage daughter is in the throes of relationship drama. Today's teenagers face a veritable minefield of technological traps we never envisioned, in addition to the young relationship classics. The mom felt trapped in the role of police officer. The daughter responded to her authoritarian regime as every teenager does...with ill concealed rebellion.
The best trick in parenting is to take the emphasis off the conflict and redirect your energy into a positive course of action you can pursue together. To that end I took a page from my days as a presenter for an abstinence based sex education program for teens. We found that the most effective part of our program was what we called "Goal Setting for Relationships."
Today's young people are encouraged to set all kinds of life goals. The majority of them relate to career and future financial stability. Bucket lists have also become popular. But they are seldom encouraged to set goals for their relationships. Without that long term outlook, they take relationships as they come and fall into every trap in their way. So, we encourage them to set goals for their future relationships.
If you want to be married someday, and maybe raise a family, that should affect your present behavior. If you think of your future spouse as a person who is already out there, living life on a course to meet and marry you, you might consider how your current choices affects this person. Sexually transmitted diseases are a bummer to have, and a bigger bummer to have to tell the person you love and want to spend your life with about. Every relationship you have leaves it's emotional mark on you. What kind of marks will you be carrying into your marriage?
Heavy huh?
How about, what kind of person do you want to spend your life with? When you begin to list the things you want in a partner, you may begin to see how the current crop of available mates don't measure up. You may even begin to see how you don't measure up. You deserve the best, and you can be the kind of person the best deserve, if you start now. When you find the one who does meet your heart's desire in a mate, you'll recognize them because you have taken time to know yourself and what you value in others.
Feelings cannot be trusted. You are biologically wired to procreate with any virile partner. You are also biologically wired to go through periods where all those emotions collapse and leave you with a partner who may or may not be what you thought when looking through hormone colored glasses. Let reason rule over emotion, and emotion will follow where reason leads. It will be easy to fall in love with a partner who respects and honors you. Be liberal with your friendship, but careful with your life partner.
I'm not talking one thing and living another here. I had the benefit of three teenage siblings when I was little. At the age of five, I observed their relationship drama and began to think of my own future mate. I began praying for him. I asked God for a husband with green eyes, blonde hair, and, since I didn't know how tall I would be, that he would be 4-6 inches taller than me so I could wear high heels but didn't have to. You can imagine what my siblings had been discussing to make me think on these points.
Throughout my childhood and teenage years I prayed for my husband. My ideals became more meaningful and better developed. I thought about him when I had a crush on some boy or other and checked my behavior. I wondered who he was and if I knew him already. My lack of interest in relationship games set me apart from other girls, but allowed me to have frank open friendships with a lot of really decent guys. Friendships that helped me to understand what men need and how they communicate, making me more fit to live with a man as his wife someday.
When I was sixteenish, my older brother's friend got a job in the young men's department at JCPenney. He cut and washed his long greasy hair, could afford new clothes and glasses without tape over the bridge of the nose. I realized he had blonde hair, green eyes, and was four to six inches taller than me. This surprised me. I had known him since I was thirteen, and he had known me as the annoying little sister of his friend.
He told me later that his girlfriend had actually expressed jealousy over me, as he considered me a girl of excellent wifely potential...for some unknown future guy of course. He always kept a list of girls with that kind of potential. Girls who deserved respect and ought to be looked after. He put a similar degree of thought into his relationships as I did. He was always friends with the prettiest sweetest girls, but they never saw him as boyfriend material. He had nice guy syndrome really bad. Mothers loved him, but the girls were looking for more excitement.
I bring myself more excitement than I need. A steady reliable man who is happy to let me soar and look out for me when I start to crash is just what I needed. As a teenager I had severe emotional meltdowns every three months or so. When I started hanging out with him, those meltdowns ceased.
When my brother went overseas for a year we became close friends in our own right. When his girlfriend dumped him I volunteered to go with him to return the engagement ring he had on layaway. A few months later we were spending all our time together and rumors were flying so we decided we might as well give actually dating a try. Within a month of that, I knew he was the man I wanted to marry. The knowing was mutual. I was too young. A year and a half lay between me and legal adulthood. My parents couldn't outright reject him, as he had been accepted so long for my brothers sake, but they weren't particularly happy with him for me. It was not easy to wait so long to get married and we didn't always make good decisions, but we never doubted our choice.
I married my first boyfriend when I was nineteen years old. We have four children and fifteen years to our credit. I have never regretted it, never wished for my freedom. We are more together than the sum of our parts. I have succeeded in meeting most of the relationship goals I set for myself. The only one left requires time, but I fully expect to enjoy our fiftieth anniversary. We have experienced more than our share of life's challenges, but met them together and been strengthened by them. The depths of intimacy we have experienced are not achievable outside of the kind of relationship we have. They require time, fidelity, trust, openness, kindness, endurance, decisiveness, and decidedness. A solid foundation for a lifetime of happiness, and yes, really really good sex.
Doubt, insecurity, relationship baggage, and self-centeredness are poison to intimacy. A foundation easily laid in thoughtlessness for a house that will not withstand the realities of life. The realities responsible for the 50% divorce rate that has stood for two generations. For this generation, raised in broken homes, avoiding that statistic is vitally important, but they have no idea how to do it. It starts now, in high school, through college, into a future with hope for happiness in relationships that last.
For parents who are desperate to see their kids avoid the traps they got caught in, helping them look beyond what's happening right now, to a future where they have the relationship they want to last a lifetime, may be the answer. Talking about their future partner as a real person they just haven't met yet isn't creepy. It's reality.
The ones that give them attention for being "hot" or having developed breasts or abs before their peers, are just disqualifying themselves from consideration as a future life partner. The ones that want sexy photos, to share their porn, get high, or party all the time, are also quickly disqualified. It's amazing how easy it is to eliminate the kind of people that will only bring them pain when they're thinking about the one that will make them deliriously happy.
So take a deep breath, and try a new tack. You want the same thing! You want healthy long term relationships that add to your lives instead of detract from them. Now you know how to go after it.
