Thoughts about kids and dating
When I was a teenager, I desperately wanted to date like all my classmates seemed to be doing. Or more accurately, I wanted a boyfriend because it would define me somehow. I could not have explained how, I think, except that it would be evidence that I was wanted or acceptable in the eyes of young men. I did not date all through HS. I believed I was invisible, and was actually told I was ugly by one young man. The attitude at my school was that if you didn't have a boyfriend, there was something wrong with you. I went through HS, believing there must be something wrong with me.
I have discovered, as my classmates have all begun to gather on Facebook, that most of us felt invisible, and that it's entirely possible that boys did not ask me out for reasons *other* than that I was invisible (or ugly) back then. Most appeared to have simply been shy.
Also, I had a very good friend in school who wore a 'promise ring' (the modern equivalent of being 'pinned'?) which was a promise that someday she and her boyfriend would get engaged...IOW, engaged to be engaged. Well, why not just *get* engaged?
What I observed then, and perceive now, is that "dating", which I believe started with the concept of 'suitors' who would come calling on a young woman and visit with her in her own home - and nobody thought it odd if a half-dozen young men were calling on a pretty young woman, although I doubt *they* enjoyed the competition - has become a kind of serial test-marriage, with benefits, sometimes for kids as young as 12 or 13. The expectation is that you start dating or going steady or whatever the term is now, and you instantly become off limits to dates with, or even friendly relationships with, anybody else of the opposite sex. Spending time alone in private is expected; physical affection is also pretty much expected. When the kids break up, and they inevitably will...they move on to the next.
I don't want my kids to "date" if this is what dating is today. I tried similar in college and wound up emotionally hurt as much or more by rejections as I was by relationships that began and ended (not that there were many of the latter). By the time I met my husband and we began to date with the intent of discovering if we were compatible enough to get married...I was pretty messed up. It is a credit to him that he was able to overlook all of that until the stability of the relationship was able to heal me. Today makes 17 years, by the way.
I know we frown on arranged marriages in America, but I see the wisdom of them more and more. Love-matches seem to fail an awful lot of the time, and serial monogamy beginning in the early teens seems like a recipe for wounded hearts & souls. Parental involvement in helping to at least vet the prospective mate seems vital enough to outweigh any intrusion on privacy.
None of this tells me what to do when my girls get old enough to want to start dating. But I'd love to spare them some of the hurts I received, which did *not* make me stronger, but merely left me scarred. I'd love to hear thoughts on this.