For Goodness Sex (10 page)

“Great!” a sly guy interrupts, “You just said we have to practice hookups, so I’m gonna practice and practice and practice and tell my mom you said it was OK.”

I turn to one of the more mature members of the class and ask, “Is that what I said?”

“Nope,” he confirms with a shake of his head.

“Just to be clear,” I say with deliberateness, “If you’re looking to me to tell you what kind of relationship you can or should be in, then I don’t think you’re ready for any kind of sexual relationship. I’m not saying everyone needs to have a hookup while they’re in high school. Only you can decide what kind or level of relationship you’re ready for. Part of what this class is all about is giving you a framework to figure that out. Some people may decide they never want to have a hookup at any point in their lives, but especially in high school.”

That statement brings an interesting mix of responses. Some kids snort in derision; others visibly relax, relieved of one particular burden in the midst of a life that already seems too complicated.

Building Healthy Relationships:
What Is Your Bottom Line?

A
s adults, we’ve likely fallen in and out of love, survived heartbreak, fallen into bed with somebody we knew wasn’t right for us. All of these interactions helped shape us into who we are today. While many teenagers think they know everything about, well, everything, an important part of coming of age is understanding what you want out of relationships (and life for that matter) and, more important, what you
don’t
want out of relationships (and life). So begins our conversations about deal breakers and deal makers.

Many of my students begin the school year with the idea that they’re going to be much more successful in their relationships. When you live in a hypersexualized culture like ours, everyone feels the need to be paired off to feel accepted by peers and society at large, even if that pairing is a friends-with-benefits situation. Our discussion about deal makers and deal breakers is really a conversation about what teens are willing to accept in a relationship and what they’re not and how those limits inform their decisions about their sexuality. For example, some kids know even as young as sixteen that they’ll never be in a long-term relationship with someone who is not of their religion. I’ve had many of my Jewish students tell me they’d never marry someone who doesn’t share their faith tradition. That’s a real deal breaker.

Other kids won’t know how to answer me when I ask if they have any deal breakers when it comes to relationships. A few will always wonder aloud if they have any deal breakers at all. I challenge them to think harder—nearly all of us have something that would end a relationship, or seal it. Maybe it’s your sweetie’s age. Are you willing to date someone a decade older? What about younger? If your partner physically pushed you during a fight, would that be the end of the relationship for you? What if your partner made fun of your little sister? It’s also important for kids to know that some deal makers and deal breakers can change as we grow. Others will remain set in stone no matter what our age. Thinking about our individual deal makers and deal breakers in relationships is an evolving process. We continually need to call them to mind, evaluate them, and make adjustments when necessary.

Parents often have quite a few bottom-line ideas when it comes to healthy relationships, and rightly so. Mom or Dad may not like their daughter’s older beau, or they may dislike the negative attitude of their son’s new sweetheart. I’ve seen many anxious parents watch their son take up with a kid whose behavior they don’t approve of and not say a word. But your kids expect you to set limits—it’s essential in helping them learn what’s right and what’s not. This is true for their relationships, as well. In the best case, you can have a conversation with your child about your concerns and try to come to a mutually agreeable solution, but as a parent, you can also say to your child: “I don’t like this person you’re hanging out with. I don’t want you to see them.” It’s also OK to seek out information about someone your child is spending a lot of time with. For example, ask the other parents on the sidelines of your child’s next sporting event what they’ve heard about a kid you’re worried about, or ask an older sibling about a younger child’s friends. Depending on the rules you’ve established with your child about online privacy, it might also be appropriate to look at their Facebook page or the texts on their phone.

Still, a parent walks a fine line when expressing an opinion about a child’s relationships. Say the wrong thing, and your child may simply get angry and push you away. It’s best to help the child do some critical analysis so he or she comes up with the conclusion on his or her own. For example: If your tenth-grade daughter suddenly grows close to a mean girl, it’s OK to say you don’t like how her friend treats people. Then find more subtle ways to bring it up in conversation. If you once had a mean girl treat you badly, share the story. Kids respond incredibly well to stories about how their parents handled similar situations.

It’s much better to have a conversation about healthy relationships—what makes good relationships good—than a talk about what’s wrong with your son or daughter’s friend. I spend a few weeks teaching kids what it means to be in a healthy relationship, so they have some basis for recognizing the types of relationships they find themselves in and what the possible pros and cons are of any relationship. One of the problems that I see today is that kids don’t have a real sense of what a healthy relationship should look like, how to get into one, and how to get out of an unhealthy one. That’s partially because they have so few role models. Many have parents who have split, their peers are equally clueless, and the relationships they see portrayed in the movies or “reality” TV aren’t exactly real.

When I define what I mean by a “healthy relationship” with my class, the first thing I say is that the relationship
must
have equitable levels of power. I don’t say equal, because I don’t think they’ll ever be exactly equal when it comes to factors like money, age, and sexual experience. In a high schooler’s world, power often depends on who has a license, how late someone’s curfew is, whose parents let their child drink in the basement with friends. For a classic example of a power imbalance, take the senior dating a ninth grader. This is a problematic relationship for many reasons, but mostly because that relationship will never be close to equal in power. Ninth-graders can’t drive, twelfth-graders can. The older kids know their way around the school better, they have more friends, and often more sexual experience. It’s nearly impossible for a twelfth-grader
not
to take advantage of a ninth-grader in the same way that it’s hard for a ninth-grader not to give in to a twelfth-grader. The relationship is unequal. When I challenge kids to think about why this relationship is not a healthy one, they often push back.

“What if it’s a really mature ninth-grader and an immature twelfth-grader?” they’ll ask.

“What if the younger person has more social power than the older one?”

“What if the ninth-grader is the one with more sexual experience?”

I find when arguing with teenagers, it’s helpful to use sources of information they respect, and (sadly) that often means the Internet. When they push back about older-younger relationships, I ask them, “In your time surfing the Web, haven’t you come across that formula that tells you the age of the youngest person a person should date?” They nod their heads, and someone always yells out, “Half your age plus seven!”

I am uncertain of the origin of this “rule,” but it’s actually a helpful guideline for kids in high school. If you’re fourteen, then you should be dating someone who is fourteen. If you’re eighteen, you shouldn’t be dating someone under sixteen—and only a handful of ninth-graders are sixteen. Of course there’s always someone who will note that most seniors are seventeen, and according to the formula, they can date someone who’s fifteen and a half. My response is simple.

“You always round up.”

Another critical component of a healthy relationship, I tell them, is maintaining your individuality within the relationship. I try to stress to my students the difference between being two people in a relationship and being a relationship of two people. Don’t see the difference? Look at what comes first in each sentence. “Two people in a relationship” is about two individuals coming together to create a third entity (the relationship) that exists in addition to themselves as individuals. In a “relationship of two people,” each partner’s individuality is subsumed into the greater relationship. There’s a great example of this in the comic strip
Zits
by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman. RichandAmy are described on the strip’s website as “an inseparable couple unanimously considered as one organism.” They’re drawn in a perpetual embrace, together all the time, and can’t make a move without the other person being involved. My shorthand for these couples is that they “share a lung” and can’t breathe if they get too far away from each other.

In so many teenage relationships, there’s an expectation that your sweetie comes first, above your friends, schoolwork, sports. I often tell my students: “You shouldn’t be with your sweetheart 24-7.” You may want to, but it’s not a good idea. Each person is allowed to have friends and interests and time away from the other. I ask those students in relationships to take a challenge. For the next twenty-four hours, I’ll tell them, I don’t want you to text your sweetie more than once every two hours. Most can’t do it. It’s not just because they’re a wired generation and default to text rather than talking (which we’ll address later). It’s because they haven’t developed a sense of trust or security in their relationship. They need everything to be validated over and over again. Living that way causes an incredible amount of anxiety, and I don’t think it’s healthy. Also, that constant contact when directed toward a significant other can be a form of power.
Where are you? What are you doing? Who are you with? When will you be home?
In extreme cases, it can even morph into a form of bullying, harassment, or abuse. This generation is the first to come of age with smartphones, and it’s as difficult for them to set boundaries with their phones as it is for us adults. It’s hard to say to a friend or sweetheart, “I have soccer after school, then I have to do my homework and go to bed. Talk to you tomorrow,” and then to ignore the flurry of status updates and countertexts that will come their way in the minutes and hours later. This point isn’t just about electronic communication, though. It’s important for anyone to be able to express and pursue one’s own needs, wants, and interests while in a relationship. When each partner claims personal power and individuality, the possibility of an abusive or enmeshed relationship is lessened. While it’s hard at first for teens to understand that this healthy division doesn’t make them any less committed to the relationship, learning to balance their own identity with their identity as half of a couple is an important skill for young people to develop.

Some kids will argue that they can carry on a romantic relationship largely through e-mails, status updates, and texts. I don’t believe that. They tell me I’m old and out of touch. I believe if two people have the option of face-to-face meetings but choose an alternative way to be together, like texting or skyping, it’s fair to ask why. I challenge students to think about why they’re choosing to text so much with a sweetheart. Is it because it’s less awkward? Sometimes I think kids use the Internet as a crutch to avoid the work of relationships. If you want to be in a long-term romantic relationship, you have to figure out how to be in the same room together and talk to each other without the filter of a screen. You have to push through the awkward moments. When you’re sixteen or seventeen, the worst thing in the world is feeling awkward—after all, you are terribly self-conscious most of the time, but at the deepest level, you simply want to be loved and accepted. But as I tell my students over and over again, “Real life is awkward!” and the only way to deal with awkwardness is to walk through it and come out the other side. They push back mightily against this idea, yet it does eventually sink in. On a visit back to the school during a college break, one of my former students told me that the most important lesson he took away from the class was that life was awkward and that was OK. He said it allowed him to be
so much more authentic with friends and sweethearts; he didn’t have to try to be perfect. He could just be himself and go from there.

Another component of a healthy relationship: being able to express both positive and negative feelings, comments, and opinions to your sweetheart. We disrespect teenagers sometimes by saying that they don’t know what they want, but sometimes they do, and it’s an important life skill to know that you can own those feelings. If a young woman really does want to have sex with her sweetheart, she should be able to say so without being coy. She shouldn’t have to say no if she means yes, because she’s embarrassed. Similarly, a boy who is fine with kissing and cuddling shouldn’t feel the need to have sex with his sweetheart to feel good about the relationship. Even though a friend relationship is different from a romantic relationship, I remind kids that there should be the same level of comfort and honesty. “Would you think twice about telling a friend that you can’t talk because you need to study? When your friend asks what movie you want to see, don’t you tell them what you really want rather than what you think they want to hear? It should be the same with your sweetheart.” My mentor in graduate school, Dr. Kenneth George, studied love. He said the best way to define romantic love was “best friend + sex.” I amend and clarify that slightly for my students to “best friend qualities + sexual desire.” I tell my students that their sweetheart doesn’t have to be their best friend, but that their relationship should reflect the same qualities—honesty, ease, and joy.

One way that parents can inspire their kids to practice expressing themselves is by giving them choices and really encouraging them to say what they want as opposed to what parents want for them.
Do you want to go to church or stay home? We’re going to your sister’s soccer game—are you interested in joining us?
Whether it’s allowing them to choose their own clothes or giving them a weekly allowance to manage, in these small ways, you’re helping them build a strong sense of self and practice voicing their own wants and needs.