Copyright Baton Rouge Advocate
When I was in high school in the 1980s, if I wanted to have a private conversation, I’d have to wait until I got home after school. Then I’d have to “unhook” the receiver from the wall phone and stretch its long cord into another room, where I would stuff towels under the door to mask the sound. It was a process. I, like most teens my age, had a time limit, because there was only one phone line, and my mom often needed to use it or didn’t want the line busy if someone important called. Today, teens can have totally private conversations sitting right next to you in the car on the ride to school, and often in school and for hours after school. Some teens even fall asleep while they are on FaceTime with each other. Due to technological advances, young people have unprecedented access to one another and incredible amounts of privacy. As such, they get to know one another very deeply and very quickly. But it takes time to really get to know someone. A wise marriage therapist friend often quips, “You don’t really know someone in less than a year. You need to go through all four seasons with someone before you really get to know them.” What today’s teens can know about each other in three months would have taken us Gen X’ers a year or more. There are benefits to this. They can vet people more quickly and discern more quickly who they really want to know better — and those they don’t. But the “data” sharing is only part of a healthy relationship. Trust is equally, if not more, important, and trust can only be formed over time. Many young people are sharing too much about themselves in too short an amount of time. I regularly see relationships with two years of intimacy stacked on top of a six-month trust bridge. This creates the possibility of very intense breakups, which leave adults wondering, “How can they be so distraught? They’ve only been dating six months.” It's because their six months is equivalent to what two years would have been for us. Here are a few practical tips for helping teens pace themselves in romantic relationships. Normalize attraction and infatuation Too often I hear adults say, “You’re just infatuated.” That’s a patronizing statement. Teens will be more open to guidance when you validate their experience rather than dismissing it as a “puppy love” phase. Infatuation is a normal, wonderful phase early in a relationship. Instead, say, “It's normal and healthy to feel so strongly about someone.” Ask them thinking questions about the relationship It's normal in a romantic relationship to have strong feelings become the center of focus. We can help teens to have a more balanced view by asking them: What is it that you like about that person? What do you think they like about you? In addition to the positive traits you see in them, what are some qualities you don’t like? What do you think about the pace of the relationship? Are you comfortable with the pace? What could you do to slow it down a bit if you wanted or needed to? Help them understand what a healthy pace looks like Ask them about a friend they have had for a long time. Ask them about how much they trusted that person when they first met them. Ask “What more do you know about them now, a year or two later, than you did when you first met?” Help them to understand that trust is a layered process over time, and it is often compartmentalized. Just because I trust my doctor to care for my physical health, doesn’t mean I’d allow her to invest my retirement funds. The same is true for everyone else in our lives. Help them envision what trust looks like at one month, three months and even a year. This gets their brains working on looking at the relationship from a bigger perspective. Petitfils is a licensed professional counselor in Youngsville.
