AT
LARGE
Advice for the lovelorn
March 24, 2005
By
Doug Cabral
I suppose
you are anxious to learn my views in the Terry Shiavo feeding tube
debate. Well, I'm going to disappoint you. There are some subjects
about which I've decided to have no opinion at all. I may choose
to embrace someone else's opinion, or I may choose to take a position
of blind, determined ignorance, but whatever it is, it's not going
to be exposed here this morning.
I have another subject in mind. It's young love and especially young
love whose flowered path has become an uphill, thorny slog.
At the beginning of the last century, Shaw said, “First love
is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.” True
enough, but he might have added pain, family upheaval, and advice,
delivered foolishly by outdated parents to unheeding kids. Into
every family's life, a little crushing, unspeakable heartbreak and
miserable emotional wretchedness must fall. What to do?
At times like this, parents may find themselves turning for wise
counsel to the shockingly large and grandly inflated community of
self-appointed advisors, who publish books and pamphlets and internet
web sites on the subject of young love and its inevitable disappointments.
(I say beware, and I ask, have these people ever had kids?)
For instance, on the subject of breakups, which are as daily as
tooth brushing in the world of teenage love, raisingkids.com advises,
“Breaking up, as the song tells us, is hard to do. So take
your teenager seriously.”
Wrong. Off the track from the outset.
The correct response to a jilted teenager's lament is, “As
long as you will have more free time, how about cleaning up the
cellar.”
If you need a sweetener, add, “I'll pay you.”
Raisingkids.com continues, “If your teenager is the person
being finished with, it'll probably come as a shock. If it's the
first time it's happened, this is probably the worst it's ever going
to get. Your teen is caught by surprise and hasn't got the experience
to know the world isn't coming to an end.”
(By the way, how about that “finished with”, how hopelessly
circumloquatious [sic] is that?)
But, back to the matter at hand, what you say is, “Listen,
it's nothing, the world's not coming to an end. Get over it. Next
time, dump her before she dump's you. What about the cellar?”
Reading these advice columns, one learns that some of the consequences
of a bad teenage breakup may be a slide into “alcohol and/or
drug abuse, no social life, bad-mouthing, depression, dating disorders,
overworking, self-harm, sleeping around, stalking behaviors, truancy,
bad skin, insomnia, loss of appetite, nightmares, panic attacks,
puffy eyes, weight loss.”
Wow. That doesn't really ring true to me. In my teenage experience,
when jilted - a recurrent and ultimately inconsequential event in
my life - the most significant, but thankfully fleeting, phenomenon
was a few days of mooning around the house. After a week, my dad,
who had a way of getting to the point, would say, “For God's
sake, get out of the house and do something, or I'll make you wish
you had.” That generally put an end to the doldrums.
Apparently to prevent an impending teenage breakup that might plunge
their child into despair, some parents permit the child to invite
the teenage paramour to move into the house with them and set up
housekeeping in the child's bedroom.
Raisingkids.com has some nuts and bolts advice concerning the benefits
that flow from such tactics: “One of the best arguments for
allowing teenagers to sleep together at home is that you know where
your son is, what he's up to, and with whom. It also gives you a
credible stance when addressing vital issues like contraception
and protection from sexually transmitted diseases (which have increased
among 16- to 19-year-olds).”
Grrr. I'm not even going to get into how fundamentally wrong this
approach is, but I will touch on one or two second-level objections.
First off, the whole point of being a parent, the daily purpose,
is to get the kids to move out of the house, off to college, home
for brief, cheery visits in the summer and at other holidays during
the year, and to raise families of their own. Suggesting to a child
that his room is more than a stop along the way to a room in a house
of his own elsewhere is a big mistake. And the notion of adding
a teenager, one who is in full teenage flower and one you haven't
had a chance to train, is criminally foolish.
Next, if your family is standard-issue, you have arguments that
sometimes turn into fights. It's as common as dirt. You know how
it goes, there's a lot of yelling before a loving reconciliation
occurs. Letting the girlfriend or boyfriend move in means there'll
be another whole pseudo-family arguing under your roof. Who needs
that?
Apart from cleaning the cellar and inviting the consort to take
up residence, is there another way to help your children through
a breakup or a perilous moment in a romance? Probably. You might
tell them about your teenage crushes and the incalculable pile of
human rubble that was the romantic entanglements of your teenage
years. Show them your prom pictures and see if you can remember
where your date is today. Tell them about how years ago, teenagers
were more modest, how there wasn't so much hanky-panky going on,
or how you wore white gloves so your sweaty hands wouldn't ruin
a girl's dress when you danced with her. You'll enjoy telling these
stories, which may help you through the rough patch immediately
following your child's breakup. The likelihood that it will do much
good for the child is slight.
Raisingkids.com advises, “Friends rapidly lose patience with
lovesick teenagers so try and be there to listen.” Maybe, but
I'm not convinced listening helps that much. Love is deep. Its end
is messy, whether you're a teenager or not. There's almost always
drama, and it's an opening night production for the teenager enduring
it. But, continuing in terms of the theatre, for the rest of us,
it's not an original production. It's a revival, an out-of-town
opening, a touring company production. It's like going to see Cats.
It brings back memories. For the kid, it's a memory-maker.
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