Chapter 6
<< Dating >>
Getting to Know Girls
Getting to Know Boys
The way to learn how to have good relationships with girls and boys is by doing what you have to do in learning anything else — practice. How to relate to another person — and in general how to be a responsive individual — takes a lot of practice and self-knowledge.
The most common question is when is a “best” time to start going out. The answer seems too simple to be true. The right time is when you feel that it’s the right time. First of all, going out is a matter of two people pairing off so they can get to know each other better, or simply for companionship. In the background, however, especially in the minds of parents, is the fact that one is male and the other female, and that may lead to some kind of physical contact and some kind of emotional relationship based on feelings that are more than simple friendship.
When I say the “right time,” I mean the time when you think you’re ready to develop a boy-girl relationship with potential. For a boy the potential is probably sexual, whether he admits it or not. He will be thinking about kissing, fondling, maybe intercourse. For a girl the potential is to be liked and accepted — singled out as a special person. Moreover, going out means that a boy is interested enough in her to take her places, and that gives her a sense of her own importance, a sense of status.
Going out with girls or just “hanging out” begins to happen for most boys around age eleven, although there’s plenty of variation. That’s the age when what we call puberty usually sets in. If you’ve already been through it, you know the symptoms. A boy grows taller faster than he did before, and he’ll continue to grow until he’s about eighteen or twenty. (Please don’t forget the ages I’m giving you here are averages; some boys begin to grow earlier than eleven, others not until they’re fourteen or fifteen or even later.)
Other changes occur once the puberty process starts. At about twelve, usually, hair begins to grow around the penis, and soon after that, under the arms. At about thirteen, a boy will be able to ejaculate, and most boys do that as soon as they’re able. This happens mostly through masturbation, but it can also occur as the result of wet dreams, fondling and kissing a girl for a period of time, actual intercourse, or during sex play with other boys. The boy’s voice will change, dropping to a lower register and often “cracking” in the process. His breasts become sensitive, too, and he may feel little hard knots beneath the nipples, which go away in a few weeks or months.
Ordinarily these pubertal changes are spread out over a period of two years or so. They may be happening to you now, or perhaps they’ve occurred quite recently. But there’s a more subtle change, too. You may have had a good many sexual feelings before, with erection and even orgasm, but when puberty arrives, all these feelings will be stronger and more frequent.
At this point, boys develop a real interest in girls for the first time, and it is now that they should be aware that their ability to ejaculate injects an entirely new element into their relationship with them. No doubt boys are acutely aware that the girls have been developing too. They go through much the same kind of thing boys do, except for the change in voice. Another difference is in growth. Girls usually start shooting up about a year before boys, and this sometimes creates a strange, even an embarrassing situation if a boy finds his girl friend suddenly towering over him.
The bad news is that the time girls are getting ahead of boys in height is just about the time when boys first want to go out with them. Obviously, that creates a problem. A girl discovers that she’s suddenly able to look over the head of the boy she’s liked and played with since they were children. It may be two or three years before they’re back on even terms. Meanwhile, human nature being what it is, girls often don’t want to go out with a boy who’s shorter than they are. On the flip side, many boys, just beginning to date about this time, find such discrimination hard to understand, even though they themselves may not feel comfortable going out with a taller girl. As a consequence of all this, younger girls who have begun to grow that much may find themselves going out with boys a little older than they are. But since other girls are late starters, or are naturally shorter, opportunities may even up. A boy are going out with younger girls who haven’t started to grow yet, or else picking out girls his own age who are naturally shorter. Not all of them grow tall, by any means. There is also another alternative — go out with a girl who’s broadminded enough not to mind the difference in height, if it doesn’t make any difference to a girl.
There are other contrasts in the way boys and girls grow up. For example, the hair around the sex organ of the girl tends to grow somewhat earlier than the boy’s, and her breasts begin to enlarge earlier than breast knots appear in the boy. On the average, she also begins to menstruate about a year before the boy can ejaculate. But from his very first ejaculation, the boy has sperm in his semen and he can make a girl pregnant. There is some evidence to show that girls don’t ovulate — that is, produce egg cells — at the time of their first menstruation, and in fact that may not happen until several months later. But even if this delay occurs, it isn’t true of all girls, and none of them (or boys either) should take a chance.
A fact that’s even more important in the way it differs between sexes, and one that may particularly puzzle a boy, is that even when all these changes have taken place in a girl’s body, and she looks almost mature, she may not yet be terribly interested in sex, as a boy is almost certain to be. Most boys become suddenly intensely interested in sex, but most girls don’t. It’s true that girls are interested in boys in ways they haven’t been before, but they’re likely to think of this new relationship as just the fun of going out and having a good time, and most don’t want to go beyond that for a while, while a boy is sexually excited by girls and feels an urge toward ejaculation, even if it’s unconscious and he may not realize exactly what he’s feeling.
The complication — and often trouble — comes when a girl doesn’t know or understand how a boy is feeling at this particular time in his life, living in a state of almost constant sexual excitement and experiencing persistent urges toward erection and ejaculation. Sometimes girls are surprised to discover how much they ’re arousing boys by flirting with him or letting him fondle her a little or by mutual kissing. A girl may have some romantic feelings about him, but in most cases she thinks of this as just another kind of friendship, and she don’t think of what she is doing as sexual.
You may have experienced this scene yourself. You’ve gone out with a girl for an evening at the movies, or a party, and afterward you’ve taken her home, or you’re sitting somewhere in the car, and you want to go on further with what probably began earlier in the evening — holding hands, touching, putting an arm around her shoulders, maybe even a quick kiss. Now you want to go further and you put your hand on her breast while you kiss her, or perhaps touch her thighs. By that time, your penis is erect, and you feel a strong impulse to go on somehow to the point of ejaculation.
But ask yourself what the girl may be thinking and feeling while this is going on. A girl of your own age or younger in that situation may not be aroused at all. (If she is, that’s another story, and we’ll talk about it later.) She may be thinking that all this pawing around is going to get her messed up, or if she’s at home, a parent will come in and find her; in any case she may be thinking, “This boy may be a nice guy, but what does he think he’s trying to do?” More likely, she knows what he’s trying to do, and for one reason or another she isn’t going to let it happen. Girls also wonder what a boy is going to tell the other boys about their evening together.
In this scene, chances are that if you try to go any further, she’ll stop you and be angry, or at least resist you firmly, or the whole thing may disintegrate into embarrassment on both sides. It will be clear that you and the girl haven’t been operating on the same wavelength at all, and you will be puzzled and frustrated. Worse, you may feel rejected and hurt, and the experience may hamper you in getting to the same point next time you go out with a girl. If it’s the same girl, the situation could be even worse; the fear of rejection is powerful. If you’re rejected more than once, it’s possible you’ll begin to feel there is something wrong with you, and that could lead to psychological problems. And all because you didn’t understand why she made you stop.
But it isn’t only the failure to understand each other sexually that makes trouble in these early relationships. There are a good many other differences between boys and girls, and the fear both sexes have in common is the fear of being turned down, of rejection. Millions sit beside the telephone and don’t make the call they want to make because of that fear.
As teen-agers know, it’s the feeling of rejection that lies at the bottom of many of their difficulties. If your father, mother, or someone else rejects you, or if you think they do, it may or may not be true, but in any case it doesn’t mean you deserve to be rejected or that other people feel the same way. In fact, it may be just the opposite. Boys won’t reject a girl just because she won’t do everything they want her to. As well as girls won’t reject a boy just because he won’t do everything they want him to. It’s much better to be independent, to be your own self.
You’ll have to fight the fear of rejection right from the beginning because it can spoil a lot of good times and opportunities. It may help to remember that you’re in the same boat with everybody else. All of us, young or old, are going to be rejected during our lives — when we look for jobs, in relationships with other people, including sexual ones, and at countless other times. We simply have to learn how to deal with rejection in its many shapes and forms so that it won’t hurt us too much.
You can learn to do it in several ways. And there is one way not to deal with it — by turning your back on life and trying to avoid placing yourself in a position where you might be rejected. That would be like shutting yourself up in a room for the rest of your life. You could do it, but life wouldn’t be life anymore. It’s far better to figure out why you’ve been rejected, if it happens, and then try to do something about it. It could be your fault, you know; maybe you did something wrong. But even then, you can learn from the experience and not repeat it.
Most often, though, the problem is with the girl who rejects you. She may be interested in you for selfish reasons, not you as a person. For instance, she may be going out with you only because she wants to go to a particular party and no one else has asked her. Next time you call, she may say no simply because you don’t fit in with her new plans, and in that case, there’s nothing wrong with you. She’s thinking only of herself, in a thoughtless and rude way, to be sure, but that’s her privilege.
Again, a girl may turn you down not because there’s anything wrong with you but simply because she just isn’t interested in you. That may hurt your ego, but just remember that you’re not interested in every girl you meet. If she rejects you, and you can’t find anything in your own behavior to account for it, the best thing is to understand that it’s her right and privilege to feel that way — and look for somebody else.
But let’s not underestimate the feeling. It hurts to be rejected, and it’s possible there’s even more rejection today than there used to be, in this speeded-up world we live in, which is filled with more possibilities than your parents ever enjoyed. At the same time, it’s true that the feeling of rejection, of not being wanted, is one of the most devastating things that can happen to a person — and don’t forget, it happens to girls, too. Rejection is the price you pay for learning to get along with girls, by being with them, by going out with them while you’re young.
It may be consoling to remember that everybody makes mistakes in this department, and if you don’t take yourself too seriously, you can even laugh at some of your own. In any case, it’s absolutely true that a “failure” in this area isn’t the end of the world. If you learn to deal with rejection in going out, it will help you to handle it in other situations as you grow up to be an adult. It’s like learning any other skill. Once learned, it’s something that will always be useful, a help in getting over rough spots.
Probably the best way to begin is by learning to relate to girls — that is, by being really interested in another person, being concerned about her and her interests. We may be living in the selfish “me era,” but it’s as true now as it ever was that you can’t build good relationships on that idea. To relate, you have to accept the fact that another person has the right to reject you, and you have the same right. No one is obligated to accept anyone else. If you can understand and accept that right, which everyone possesses, you won’t be nearly so hurt when rejection happens to you.
Of course, you may try to relate to a girl with the best of intentions, but in doing so you may make all kinds of mistakes. Everybody does. For instance, you may do something you know is awkward — you may make a careless remark that offends the girl. Or you may fail to introduce her to someone you know when you meet at a party. Or leave her alone to talk to someone else when you’re the one who’s brought her to the party. Or you may find yourself in a situation that’s beyond your experience, and that may make you stutter and stammer around trying to handle it. Even more common, a boy may be so interested in himself that he doesn’t think about a girl’s feelings, of what she may want to do, or what she may like to talk about. All too commonly, boys (and grown men) may not want to listen to girls (or women); they just want to talk about themselves.
An even more common kind of behavior that leads to rejection occurs when a boy waits too long to ask a girl to go out, either because he’s shy or else is afraid he’ll be rejected. When he summons up his courage at last, calls her, and finds out someone else has asked her first, he’s crushed. Logic may tell him that he might have expected this to happen, and that she meant no offense to him as an individual, but just the same he feels rejected — maybe unworthy, too.
All mistakes are profitable in the end, however, if you can learn from them. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to make mistakes.
Sometimes it happens that boys are prodded into going out with girls too early, before they’re really ready for it. Parents who do this don’t realize that a boy can be miserable if he hasn’t grown up quite as fast as some of his friends and doesn’t yet have the interest in girls that they do. He may get some prodding from his friends, too, who are going out with girls and invite him along to be part of the crowd. That’s especially hard to resist, but if a boy isn’t ready, he shouldn’t go out with girls until he is. There’s plenty of time.
When he does begin to go out, he may find it easier to go with another couple or with a group. That makes conversation less difficult while he’s learning how to get along with girls and is acquiring a little assurance about being with them. This works best if the other boys in the group are in the same situation. In that case, they’ll be reinforcing each other. If one is more experienced, the others can learn by watching how he behaves. But after a boy has done this a few times, he’s likely to have learned enough to go out with a particular girl — and by then he has probably found a particular girl he wants to go out with.
If what I’ve said here doesn’t seem to apply to your particular case, that’s because there are so many social differences affecting adolescent boys. These differences are as great as the physical ones. Earth is a big planet, with people living in all kinds of situations,and the way they live varies from place to place, so going out with girls isn’t the same in big cities as it is in small towns, nor is it the same in different parts of big cities.
Young people in California have different lifestyles from those in a small town in Maine. Even the look-alike suburbs in one country may have different behavior patterns, depending on where they are. Geography, family backgrounds — these and a lot of other things make a difference. So it isn’t safe to make sweeping generalizations; people behave differently depending on where and how they live.
One of the major differences is using the family car. This raises all kinds of problems in small towns and other places where the car is essential equipment. But in New York, for instance, boys and girls have an entirely different set of problems, since not many of their parents are likely to have cars. If the city is Los Angeles, however, a car is just as essential as though people lived in the country.
Where you live, in short, has a lot to do with how you go out with girls, and how you learn to relate to them. For example, it’s easier to have sexual activity if you have a car, and consequently this freedom often creates conflicts with parents, especially in the case of girls. But parents worry not only about what might occur sexually; they know the high rate of fatal automobile accidents among young people and the dangers of drinking at parties. Consequently the whole learning experience becomes more complicated. Combining freedom and cars, as we seem to be doing today, makes the possibilities for getting into trouble as numerous as those for learning.
The most common difficulty occurs in small towns where, even with cars, there aren’t many places to go out with a girl. This situation only multiplies the problems, since adolescents are not likely to be sitting home every night reading a good book or listening to the radio or watching television. The pregnancy rate is high in such places, but then, so is it in uncontrolled urban environments.
When Kinsey gathered his statistics in the 1940s, they showed that four out of ten boys had intercourse outdoors some of the time, and about the same proportion had it in a girl’s home. For about one in ten, the place was a car, and for about the same proportion it was in the boy’s home. The most infrequent places were hotels, motels, and the beach. While no reliable statistics are available today, it’s unlikely that these figures have changed substantially.
Family backgrounds often make a difference. Sometimes religion may dictate not only what girls a boy may go out with, but even how often he is permitted to go out with them. Again, some parents are overfearful and do their best to restrict their children; others don’t seem to be worried about what their sons and daughters are doing and appear to believe that what they don’t know won’t hurt them. In the homes of divorced parents, it can go either way — too much or too little restriction, depending on the situation. Boys and girls in such situations are likely to start going out sooner than others and to have earlier sexual experiences. Ethnic differences, too, may determine how much the weight of tradition will affect these early learning experiences. Today, it should be added, there are far fewer restrictions than there were in your parents’ day. Standards change from generation to generation, and now, obviously, there’s a great deal more freedom than there has ever been. Parents may still be debating whether this is a good or a bad thing, but very few adolescents (except those who are religiously motivated) would argue against their freedom.
In any case, all other things being equal, a boy who has been going out with girls for a while tends to find a particular girl. When that happens, an old question arises. It used to be called “going steady,” but now it doesn’t have a name; it just means going out with one person on a regular basis. Parents may still argue about whether such exclusivity is a good thing at such an early age, but adolescents themselves don’t consider it an arguable subject.
It’s easy enough to see why it can be a good thing. Seeing only one person offers a certain security. Both the boy and the girl know they’ve always got someone to go out with. Since the girl is not going with anyone else, she’s always available for the boy, as he is for her, which is just as important as far as she’s concerned.
From a boy’s standpoint it’s a relief not to have to make a new adjustment to someone else every time he goes out, nor does he have to meet new parents. He likes the girl very much, probably believes he’s in love with her, and it’s a satisfaction to be with the girl he thinks is more attractive than any other he knows. It’s a deeper and more emotional relationship than either can obtain by simply playing the field, and of course that’s what marriage is about. Rarely will a boy marry this particular girl, but he’ll be getting a valuable lesson in what marriage is like, in what it means to be with someone all the time in a close relationship.
But there are also some advantages in not going out with the same person all the time. If you go out with a lot of different girls instead of concentrating on one, you’ll get to know a wide variety, and in time you’ll have a better idea of what kind of personality you get along with best — an excellent preparation for marriage or any other kind of committed relationship.
These early friendships duplicate to some extent the problems of such close relationships in later life. A boy goes out with a girl, let’s say, who is moody and irritable, or has a sharp temper, and they have frequent fights. He’s likely to be wary of that kind of girl later on. Again, he may find out that his girl friend is too sloppy in dress and manners for the kind of taste he’s acquired, and that will be another kind of guide. If a girl is careless about what she says, if she’s tactless and doesn’t care how her words affect other people, a boy will be able to see at first hand how hard it is to live with that kind of person. But if he finds a girl who is warm and loving and sympathetic, even though he probably won’t marry her, he will have had the experience of knowing what it’s like to be with such a person.
Girls have the same learning opportunities as boys, of course. When they do marry, both may make mistakes, but it won’t be the result of inexperience. Early adolescent relationships are often painful because they constantly break up, and new combinations are tried, but it’s all a part of the tumult of growing up. It’s how we learn — if we do.
Everyone knows that people do fall in love with others who have the bad traits I’ve mentioned above, and simply disregard them, but it’s also true that earlier experiences are bound to affect choices in a way a boy, or a girl, may not even be conscious of, and can influence decisions in subtle ways, often indirectly.
There’s still another good reason for a boy to go out with a lot of different girls instead of confining himself to one. It will be valuable experience because he’ll be placed in a variety of social situations, meeting new friends, meeting new parents, and all of this will help him to construct his own social life later on.
There is something to be said for going out with a good many boys. If she does, a girl will have a better chance to find out what kind of male she wants to live with eventually, if that’s what she intends to do. She’ll discover what personality traits in a boy attract her and which, make her unhappy. She may find out that moody, irritable boys don’t suit her easygoing, essentially optimistic way of looking at things. Or she finds that boys with sharp tempers frighten her. Or that sloppy boys get on her nerves if she’s inclined toward neatness — or the other way around. She’ll be able to see clearly the difference between an uncaring person and one who’s warm and loving. Such experiences help a girl make up her mind later about what kind of person she chooses to share her life with, and it may save her from bad and risky situations.
It wouldn’t be realistic, however, to say that girls necessarily wind up having relationships with the kind of men who are best for them. As often as not the reverse is true, and some girls appear to have a talent for being involved with men who are going to make them unhappy. But it’s also true that early and varied experiences can affect the later choice of deep relationships in a positive way.
Another advantage of playing the field is that a girl will be in a far greater variety of social situations too, meeting new parents, making new friends, and that is all good experience in learning how to construct a satisfactory social life, besides being satisfying in itself.
There’s one very real danger in going steady. Every girl who reads this has almost certainly heard about it from someone, but it’s worth repeating. It’s the fact that many of those who begin going steady early wind up marrying either while they’re still in high school or just after graduation. This is the group that has the highest divorce rate. A few years after marriage, both partners often realize that there are a lot of other people in the world, and a great many other experiences, both sexual and otherwise, that they’ve missed by settling so early for one person. A substantial part of the precious freedom that is the particular property of the young has gone and won’t come back.
These young couples, still in their early twenties and usually with one or more children, often feel themselves trapped, and many hasten to get themselves untrapped. People can make a new start with a divorce, certainly, but there’s often the problem of the children (men are not in a hurry to marry a divorced woman with children, although many do), and in any case, it isn’t psychologically easy to start all over again. And starting over at a later stage in life can be difficult.
«The ability to fall passionately in love is the most spectacular behavioral feature of adolescence. There axe plenty of scientists who don’t hesitate to study the triggers to mating behavior and the pair-bonding of other species, but who scoff at the suggestion that human falling in love could or should be investigated scientifically. They are mistaken, because human falling in love is as much an identifiable phenomenon as the pair-bonding of other species. It can be studied scientifically, and because of its significance — amply attested to by history and by the most enduring of the myths, legends, fairy tales, classics, dramas, and especially poems of all human cultures — it should be. Children often play at falling in love along with their other adult role rehearsals. Whether they come close to the real thing or not is a question that will only be answered by further investigation. It’s also normal for children to hero-worship and develop crushes on older children or adults, but these behaviors are fairly easy to distinguish from falling in love. The kind of desperate dependence on an older person some children and adolescents exhibit can be mistaken for falling in love, but it is a pathological condition that probably stems from a deficit of early clinging and cuddling.
Although the ability to fall in love is normally achieved during the course of puberty, there is evidence that it is governed by a different biological clock. Early puberty does not mean early achievement of the ability to fall in love. Children who reach puberty at four or five years of age or even younger may have wet dreams and masturbation fantasies earlier than other children, but they don’t fall in love any earlier. A few children enter puberty before age six, and among those followed in the Psychohormonal Research Unit, the youngest to have fallen genuinely in love were a boy of twelve and a girl of ten, which is not much younger than some of those who reach puberty at the normal ages.
The ability to fall in love is sometimes delayed until long after hormonal puberty. Such late blooming is not related to low hormone levels. It can be due to individual variation in the pace of achieving psychological maturity, to lack of an opportunity to fall in love, or to cultural prescription, as in Red China today where people are adjured to postpone romance and marriage until their late twenties. In some people, however, the ability to fall in love is so weak, or the inhibiting circumstances so strong, that the ability never manifests itself. There are otherwise normal adults who have never fallen in love.
The phenomenon itself is a familiar one. Falling in love is a state characterized by intense preoccupation with the loved one. His or her every feature becomes a source of minor raptures. There is an urgent need to be close to, a yearning to touch and fondle, the loved one, although the expression of these yearnings may be inhibited by moral code, cultural prescription, or circumstance. Reciprocation intensifies the phenomenon.
Falling in love inspires a jealous protectiveness that brooks no competitor. It is monogamous to the extent that it excludes the possibility of simultaneous falling in love with another person, although not the possibility of having sexual relations with another or others.
Falling in love is not a one-time thing; the experience can be repeated again and again. Onset may be sudden or gradual. It’s quite possible to fall in love at first sight, or at a distance.
The phenomenon may last only an hour or two or for months, but the maximum duration of the acute phase of a normal falling in love experience is probably no more than two years at the outside. Nature’s obvious purpose in designing the falling in love syndrome was to draw the human male and female together as soon as their sex organs matured for reproduction, and keep them together long enough to insure the next generation. As are nature’s other designs for perpetuating the various species, this one is wasteful. Falling in love absorbs so much of the time and energy of those involved and so powerfully diverts their attention from other pursuits that the young might not be cared for if it lasted indefinitely. If unrequited, it may persist, but “carrying the torch” soon becomes pathological. Those who can’t recover from a broken heart without going through a serious bereavement syndrome aren’t lovesick, they’re just plain sick. Normal falling in love either passes off completely or resolves into a calm, steady love with, or perhaps without, continuing sexual attraction. Nature’s purpose is to replace the two-way bond with a steadier three-way bond that includes father, mother, and child.
There is no better way to establish this three-way bond than by means of prepared or natural childbirth, as anyone who has assisted in a delivery — or even seen a movie of one — will know. The father trains as a coach and is present at the delivery, ready to touch and hold his newborn baby. The mother remains conscious throughout, actively helping to expel the baby, and able to reach down and hold it in her arms as soon as it has safely emerged.»
(Money, John and Patricia Tucker. Sexual Signatures: What it Means to be a Man or a Woman)
No boy who thinks he’s fallen in love at an early age will ever believe it, but if he concentrates on one girl for a long time to the exclusion of everyone else, he’s virtually certain to wake up one day and discover there are a great many other kinds of girls in the world, and a lot of different experiences, sexual and otherwise, he could have been having if he hadn’t concentrated on one girl. It’s hard to realize at the time, but it is a shame to miss so much of life before settling down to the realities of being an adult. Someone once said that youth is wasted on the young, and it’s true that there are those who don’t take full advantage in the brief time they have it. Such youthful freedom is unlikely to come again. Marriages in adolescence are too often robbers of life.
As boys today know, what usually happens is that both they and the girls have a lot of different relationships before they settle on one, if they do. There are all sorts of variations, and I wouldn’t be so foolish as to prescribe any kind of exact formula for going out, or for getting married, either. Most boys (and girls, too) discover that their friends — and they themselves, by and large — go along on some kind of middle ground, a mixed course, with periods of going out steadily with one person interrupted by other periods of playing around.
Girls who have never gone out are eager to start, in most cases, but a good many don’t know how to begin. That urge raises an old, old problem, best expressed in the all too common question, “I like this boy, but I don’t know if he likes me. How can I get him to go out with me. ”If that’s your problem, think of it in terms of going to buy a new dress. If you want new clothes, you go to a store that sells them. It’s the same thing with boys. You’ve heard girls say, “I want to go where the boys are,” and when they do that, they’re shopping, whether they think of it that way or not.
Where’s the easiest place to look? Of course — in school. There you’re in daily contact with boys your own age, and the going-out process ordinarily begins right there. School isn’t the only place to meet boys. Young people’s groups in community clubs or churches are good places, and so is the library. If your parents take you on a summer vacation, opportunities are likely to spring up like flowers. Summer jobs of all kinds, no matter where they are, offer still more chances. A more oblique approach is to choose girl friends who are already going out. That often leads to meeting friends of their friends. Sometimes it’s easy to meet boys and sometimes it’s hard, but in any case it’s only the beginning.
Some girls who read this may have tried all the approaches I’ve mentioned, and still they don’t get chances to go out. If that should happen to be your case, you don’t have to look very far for the cause. It’s you, particularly your attitude toward yourself. If it’s hard for other people, including boys, to like you, chances are it’s because you don’t like yourself.
Self-approval is a highly important element in living happily. It comes from a girl’s view of herself, or a boy’s of himself. For one thing, it means not to be obsessed with whatever physical imperfections you may have. Physical qualities alone don’t make real beauty. Girls who think boys like only the prettiest girls are looking at the wrong boys. Those who seem to be hung up on beauty usually turn out to be not the kind you’d like to go out with.
There are a good many aspects of a girl’s relationship with herself that can get in the way of going out successfully. Some girls have personality problems, like those who are in such a state of extreme rebellion at home that this situation has become the most important thing in their lives. Others may be in constant conflict with their brothers and sisters, and that, too, absorbs their emotions. Still others have strong guilt feelings about things they may have done in the past, and the result has been to erect a high wall between them and the rest of the world. Then of course there are the truly lonely girls, most of them painfully shy. All the kinds of girls I’ve mentioned here are going to have serious problems finding boys to go out with.They need to accept the fact that they’re attractive, and make the most of their natural charm, because it will take them far in all kinds of relationships.
The effect of personality problems is to make a girl so concerned with herself and her problems that she can’t see a boy as an individual in his own right, a human being with his own feelings and desires. She sees him and everything else around her only in relation to herself. That’s what I mean when I say girls have to like themselves before other people will like them. That doesn’t mean being egotistical; it just means they have to believe they’re as good as anybody else.
I can hear you saying, “How do I start liking myself?” I’ll have to admit there’s no easy answer to that question, and I won’t pretend there is. But one thing I’m certain of. Any girl can make a start simply by recognizing that she’s going to be much happier if she understands that something needs to be done, and begins to make an inventory of her own personality to see where she needs to change.
If you want to start learning how to like yourself, begin by deciding what your best points are, and work on developing them even further. At the same time be honest with yourself. Maybe you have some bad points, too, or at least characteristics that set you apart from other girls (or boys). They can be overcome with a little work. You may be shy, for example, and that can create social problems. But don’t despair; even shyness can be conquered if you work at it. If you can’t express yourself very well, that isn’t hard to cure, either. Perhaps you realize, if someone hasn’t told you, that you have a short temper, and that’s a trait you can eliminate if you try.
But after you’ve faced your bad qualities and done something about them, the most important thing is to focus on your good qualities. Learn to think well of yourself because you have them, and you’ll find that your relations with other people will improve. Remember that people change all through their lives, and at any point they can change themselves if they want to do so badly enough. It takes honesty, determination, and work.
But now let’s assume that you don’t have any of these problems, and that you’re already happily going out with boys. Either they’re calling you for dates, or sometimes you’re calling one of them. A girl has every right to ask a boy if he wants to go out somewhere. There’s nothing aggressive about it, just a sharing of mutual interests. If there’s something you want to do or see, and you know a boy who would be likely to want the same thing, it’s now easy enough to talk to him about it and say, “Let’s go there together” or “I heard this new club is really great — why don’t we go and try it?”
There’s another problem in going out, and it can be a serious one. That’s the problem of age difference. Girls often want to know how much older a boy can be and still be an acceptable person to go out with. There’s no simple answer, obviously. For example, a boy’s actual age may be far different from his emotional age — up or down. A girl often finds it gratifying to have the attention of an older boy, or even a man, because it makes her feel more special.
Here, for instance, is a thirteen-year-old girl who’s going out with a high school junior or senior. That can be a worthwhile relationship if it’s based on common interests and mutual attraction. But it will help this girl, and perhaps save her from trouble, if she asks herself what other reasons the older boy might have for taking her out. Is he emotionally mature? Is he thinking of her only as a possible sexual conquest because she’s exceptionally attractive, even though she’s so much younger? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, a girl may want to reconsider going out with him, even though she’s excited about such flattering attention.
As the age difference increases, so do the problems. Here’s the same girl, but this time she’s going out with a twenty-one-year-old boy who’s just back from college on vacation, or maybe he’s out of school and working. Certainly it’s possible for two such people to have a good and meaningful relationship, but now the odds are more heavily against it. The same questions should be asked, particularly the one about his emotional maturity.
There’s an even longer step this hypothetical girl might take, one that would apply more to a girl who’s older. She may be going out secretly with the thirty-five-year-old father of the baby she sits with. Even this relationship could be a positive one, but the odds are so heavily against it that it’s much more reasonable to expect disastrous consequences. Of course, it’s exciting and fun to be noticed by such a man, but it appears to be true that the greater the age difference, the greater the chance that the older man will have some psychological problem that leads him into such a relationship. A girl’s interests are likely to be different from his, and the relationship is almost certain to end badly.
Going out with married men of any age, and particularly falling in love with one, is an invitation to trouble and heartbreak. Smart girls know that no matter what such a man may tell her, or how convincingly he says it, the odds are at least a thousand to one that he won’t divorce his wife and marry the girl. Neither his love for the girl nor whatever unhappiness he may have at home is likely to be a decisive factor when the crunch comes, as it inevitably will. To go through the agony of divorce, often with the wife fighting it, is too much for a man to contemplate in most cases. That’s something his teen-age girl friend won’t understand.
A girl who finds herself in this situation shouldn’t deceive herself about the outcome or about the man involved. If she’s willing to put up with empty weekends, surreptitious meetings, and having only part of a man, then she’s entitled to whatever short-range satisfaction she can get.
Every situation is different, I know, and special. The girl who’s dating a married man believes firmly that in her case the odds are much more in her favor than they really are. But if only she can stop deceiving herself long enough to examine her situation honestly, she may discover that things are different from what she thought. If she’s able to talk openly and freely to someone who’s not directly involved with her life, it will help her see the situation more clearly.
Of course the problems of going out are not the only ones adolescents have. It’s an unusual boy or girl who doesn’t have some kind of friction with his parents along the way. Some of these conflicts are the usual family arguments that seem so important at the time but are really trivial in the long run — like who’s going to get the car on a particular night. But other troubles may be deeper, and when they occur, they’re most often centered on the inability of parents to realize their children are growing up and don’t want to be treated like children, and on the other side, the tendency of young people to think they are more grownup than they really are.
A twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy who is treated like one by his parents will be fourteen before long, and that short time may make a considerable difference in him. But all too often, his parents continue to treat him as though he hadn’t yet slipped out of childhood.
In their first fumbling attempts at heterosexual expression, early teen-agers often encounter from parents an attitude that adults fail to understand can be damaging to their children’s growth. Parents and relatives indulge in a good deal of what they think of as good-natured kidding about the first evidences of the child’s attraction to the other sex. How many children have suffered agonies of embarrassment from laughing adults: “Have you heard? Johnny’s got his first girl.”
Or “Have you seen. Jane’s new boy friend? He’s funny-looking, but she’s crazy about him.” Laughed at, shamed, ridiculed, the children respond quite naturally with hostility and anger toward the adults, and this supposedly harmless kidding makes an already difficult situation even harder for them to live with. A good many breakdowns in communication between teenagers and their parents begin right here.
Parents ought to understand — and they should find it easy simply by recalling their own childhoods — that he primary fear children have as they approach the threshold of heterosexual expression is the fear of rejection. This is hard enough for children to overcome by itself, but the effort is immensely complicated when adults laugh at them as they take their first stumbling, fumbling steps. Even in an age so supposedly sexually enlightened as ours, and at a time when sexual sophistication seems to reach to lower and lower age levels,there may be not much change in the essential nature of these first encounters: the shyness, the fear of rejection, the first kiss, the first date. To ease this transition and to help combat rejection fears, the more unobtrusive encouragement and support parents can give their children, the better it will be for them.
Children are extremely sensitive to their parents’ attitudes at this stage of their lives. Often they are confused and upset when parents make a show of not leaving them alone in the house with a friend’ of the opposite sex. If they are sexually unaware, they are simply confused; if not, they are upset because of the implied lack of trust and the further implication that they may be planning to do something sexually, although that may not be in their minds at all. A patient of mine recalls how he spent a Sunday afternoon with his seventh-grade girl friend while her parents were away, and although the two had only innocent pleasures in mind,the parents had so intimidated them before they left them alone in the house that they were self-conscious and could hardly enjoy each other’s company.
I can hear a father or a mother exclaiming, “But how can trust them? How do we know what they’re going to do if we leave them in the house together?”
The answer is that of course the parents don’t know — any more than they know what the relationship will be when the teen-agers are together in someone else’s house, or in some private place. But if the proper foundations have been laid earlier between parents and children, the adults’ fears can be forgotten. Laying that foundation means teaching children from the earliest possible moment to respect other people, as people, and to respect their desires, rejecting force or the exploitation of other human beings. Further, if parents and children have established at an early date the good lines of communication, the children will know all about sex, and they will feel easy and comfortable about it, not secretive, furtive, or ready to use sex as an act of defiance, or as a means of releasing their aggressions.
It isn’t easy in many circumstances, but parents should learn to be tactful in their approaches to these problems. Suppose, for example, a mother and father get the feeling that their thirteen-year-old daughter is having some kind of sexual play with the boy next door. Instead of suspicious, demanding questions — “What were you doing with him in the garage this afternoon?” — something else is required.
The accusation will only be met with denials, all kinds of cover-ups, or indignation if what took place in the garage was only conversation, as it may have been. Nothing whatever will be accomplished by this approach. Instead, a general and casual conversation about teen-age culture, in a non-condemnatory tone, can lead to more specific exchanges of ideas about sexual activity without personalizing it, so that the parent doesn’t appear to be prying. Adults will find out a great deal more by asking the opinion of a son or a daughter about some phase of teen-age conduct than by tryingto talk directly about their child’s conduct. When the conversation is depersonalized and the teen-ager feels that he is not being attacked or probed, he will tell in an incidental, or sometimes direct, way what his standards of conduct are. At the same time, in such conversations parents can present their own views, in an unemotional way that makes the reasons they advance far more credible to young listeners.
It’s a wise parent who can keep up with a growing boy or girl. Admittedly, it isn’t easy. Parents have to keep shifting ground, for one thing, and that’s always difficult. The point here is that a boy shouldn’t be surprised if he’s treated by his parents as younger than he actually is. It’s hard for them — and for him, too — to determine sensibly when he’s “old enough” to go out with girls, or stay out late, or drive the car. Parents are inclined to be especially reluctant to realize that a boy is “old enough” to be interested in sex and girls.
So what can be done about this very old and difficult conflict? Quite a bit. First of all, a boy needs to realize that the conflict is a part of growing up, and that’s a process hard on both parents and children at times. Adults often say a boy should be responsible and show them he’s “old enough,” and the boy’s easy answer to that one is to ignore it, simply because it’s an adult’s way of thinking, and in particular a parent’s way.
If a boy stops to think of it, though, it does make sense. Very soon he’ll have to demonstrate he’s “old enough” to do other things, like showing he’s responsible enough to be in college, to hold a job, and somewhere along the line, to take the responsibility for looking after another human being, in marriage or whatever kind of relationship he works out.
It’s easy to demonstrate responsibility in adolescence. The method is very simple. It’s done by easy stages. Let’s say your parents ask you to be home at a certain hour when you go out at night. If you persist in disobeying this relatively small request, your parents can hardly be blamed if they don’t find you responsible in larger matters. But on the other hand, if you show you can be depended upon to do this one small thing, then your area of responsibility can be gradually extended to other things. If you show that you’re responsible about handling money, whether it’s from an allowance or a part-time job, chances are your parents will take a much more lenient view if you need more money later on to go out with girls.
What do you have to do to prove you’re responsible? Just show that you’re reliable, that you’ll do what you have to do, whether it’s homework or some household chore or whatever it is, and that you’ll do it without being nagged — another quick source of irritation on both sides. Doing things on your own without being told is a badge of responsibility.
Since it’s so easy to be responsible, it’s too bad so many boys, probably most of them, insist on rebelling against their parents. Since “teen-age rebellion” is a cliché of modern life, teen-agers somehow think they don’t have any choice. This leads to trouble in several areas, not the least of which is going out with girls. Boys go out with girls secretly, hoping their parents won’t find out. Of course, not many parents would forbid it these days, but conflicts continue on other levels about such possibly sexual relationships. If you have this conflict, it comes down to a question of honesty. It might be a good thing to examine your own set of values and decide whether it’s more important to be honest with your parents or go along with your friends and do what they’re doing without saying anything.
Obviously, either way has its drawbacks. If you’re honest, it may become difficult or impossible to do some of the things you want to do, and you may have to go counter to what other boys in your group are doing, which means losing face. But if you keep on lying at home, and going out with your friends to do whatever you want to do, there are probably going to be more or less deep feelings of guilt, if you love your parents, and along with that, a fear of what may happen if you’re caught. The important thing is to face the alternatives squarely and come to some kind of decision that doesn’t waffle between the two.
Adolescents are commonly ruled by what their peers do. They want to do whatever everybody else is doing, and of course it isn’t easy not to go along with the gang, to assert your independence and refuse to be a sheep. But think about it. It may be better to be comfortable about yourself.
Even if there’s no problem at home, there are some boys who just don’t know how to begin going out with girls. It’s a new experience, and they would be ashamed to ask advice from an older boy, or anyone else for that matter. Nobody wants to look as young and inexperienced as he really is.
For such boys, there’s one essential in getting started: You begin relationships with girls by learning to talk to them. It’s as simple as that. Talk to them in school, on the playground, or anywhere else you encounter them. Inevitably the talk will get around to the things you have in common — sports, movies, music, teachers, friends. That can lead easily to an invitation to enjoy some activity together. All you have to do then is to agree on a time and place, and you’re on the way. But talking to a girl also implies listening to her, and you’ll never find out what your common interests are if you don’t let her talk about them so you can discuss them together. Girls of all ages like boys who listen to them.
It’s important, too, as you start going out with girls, to remember that girls may very often think of going out as nothing more than a social good time, without any idea of sexual activity taking place, while you may be thinking of it as a way of having some sort of physical contact with a girl. As a wise man said, “Girls think of sex as a way of getting love; boys think of love as a way of getting sex.”
That may be true in a general way, but it doesn’t mean everybody has to be so singleminded. Boys are perfectly capable of loving whether they get any sex or not, and girls may be loving but also very interested in sex. It depends. But this difference in attitude is more often true than not, and it accounts for many of the difficulties in boy-girl relationships. When it’s carried over into adult life, it’s responsible for a great deal of misunderstanding between men and women.
Just remember that physical contact may not be what’s going through a girl’s mind. Going out together is only a first step for both of you. In most cases, much else has to happen before sexual behavior takes place, if it does. You shouldn’t draw hasty conclusions. If a girl holds your hand or puts her own hand on you, or even kisses you, it may not mean anything more than that she likes you.
Liking, however, can be the prelude to physical contact, and the more a girl gets to like a boy, the more she’s interested in physical contact. And the more consideration a boy shows for her desires and feelings, the more she’ll like him. It’s surprising what a little consideration will do.
That may sound old-fashioned to you, something your parents might say. We live in a time when girls are very often attracted to boys who are anything but considerate, and often they tend to think of strong males as those who don’t show much, if any, consideration for girls. More and more, too, young girls are asking, like their older sisters, to be treated as equals.
Much of all this, however, is on the surface. Underneath, a female may feel equal and want to be treated that way, but she also wants to be “courted” by the male, as she is in all human and animal societies. You may be cool, and play at being casual about sex and other human relationships, but just being cool won’t lead to a real emotional relationship with a girl, and it isn’t the way to have a lasting one.
True, it’s an easier way to relate, but there’s a great deal more to love and the living together it leads to. It’s impossible to get the most satisfaction out of relationships with girls by thinking only of sex, or by playing it cool, either.
In essence, “cool” says: “I’m interested in myself, and if you don’t want to come along with me, all right. If you don’t, I don’t care.” Good relationships can’t develop on that kind of foundation. They grow from mutual interests into a more intense and exclusive interest, until — if they’re serious — they result in being together in every way. Even if they’re not serious, good relationships develop in a give-and-take manner — two people giving of themselves to each other to the degree that each will accept. “Cool” is a static, don’t-care state of being in which nothing much that is more than momentarily satisfying is likely to happen.
When you do go out, the chief questions that arise concern behavior, and here the differences between the sexes become really important. Even in the new liberated era, girls are more concerned about their reputations than boys are. How far they’ll go in letting a boy fondle them, for example, is often determined more by what the boy is going to tell other boys than by anything else.
When a boy starts to kiss a girl, he imagines or hopes that she’ll be thinking, “Isn’t this great? What have I been waiting for?” Instead, if he only knew, she’s likely to be thinking, “I wonder what he’ll think of me,” or, “Will he tell the other boys, and what will they think?” That doesn’t always happen, of course, and many couples plunge into this kind of lovemaking without any thoughts at all except having fun. But the social system still plays the mindless game of “good girl” and “bad girl,” so the best thing a girl can do is to have confidence in herself and in the way she relates to her own world. If she does this, she may not get involved in sexual situations before she’s emotionally ready for them.
I think it makes more sense for a girl to decide rationally how far she wants to go in a particular situation with a particular boy, rather than to be concerned about her reputation. I know it’s hard to be rational when you’re emotionally involved, but there’s no easy solution. A girl has to think about it or not think about it. At least she should understand she has a clear choice.
Certainly there should be a better reason to guide a girl in how far she should go than what other people might think. Some girls go further than they want to because they’re afraid the boy will tell other boys that they’re “frigid” or “prudish.”
It’s a handicap for a girl to be always involved in her own problems, and similarly it’s just as crippling for her to be always concentrating on her “reputation.” A girl wants to have the freedom to be interested in what interests the boy she’s going out with, but she can do that only if she’s free of her own hang-ups. The old gag line goes, “Let’s talk about you for a while. What do you think of me?” Far too many girls behave just like that. A girl should never do that, not only when she’s out with a boy, but when she’s with anybody. That’s what bores are made of. People don’t want to hear about the state of your health, unless there’s something really serious going on, nor about your hair problems, or your experiences with other boys. Any girl could add to that list, and boys could make it longer.
It’s a problem of communicating, of being able to express feelings whether they’re positive or negative, and the ability to respond to the feelings others express. Communicating means more than just talking, though. For instance, a girl can talk about a coming school dance, but she communicates her feelings about going to it. Communicating feelings is more dangerous, because then a girl makes herself more vulnerable, more open. Yet the stubborn thing about it is that a good relationship with another person, boy or girl, involves exactly this openness and danger. I’m talking about a kind of communication that’s honest and sincere, not worrying about its effect on the other person. In short, a girl should be herself — natural, open, not exclusively concerned with making an impression on others.
Girls can help boys in this respect. Boys often fail to understand the role they should play in boy-girl relationships. All kinds of small social gestures go with relationships, and people are unfortunately prone to forget them these days. Boys have seen too many Rambo tough-guy movies, for example. I’m not talking about perpetuating old conventions between the sexes, but about courtesy to another human being. Many girls and women still appreciate it, even in the new age of equality, if a boy helps a girl on with her coat — or vice versa — or opens a car door, or carries her books if they’re obviously a heavy load.
It isn’t a question of right or wrong. A girl who subtly encourages a boy to remember these little things is emphasizing in another way the boy-girl relationship. That’s what going out is all about. By helping a boy observe these ancient and supposedly outdated customs, a girl helps to develop the male-female bond between them that she wants to establish.
Don’t forget. Penises and vaginas don’t love each other. Only people can do that.
Love isn’t sex alone. They’re really separate things, although they may occur together. It’s possible to have a great deal of affection for parents and your dog without having sex enter the picture. You may love your best friend without the involvement of sex. On the other hand, it’s also possible to have sex with someone you don’t love. It’s possible to have sex with other people in a hostile, even cruel way without having any affection for them. It’s possible to have sex without love and love without sex. In most cases, though, love in some degree and sexual feelings are part of the same response to someone else. When these two things occur in combination together, it’s the blending of the two that produces one of the most profound and meaningful, satisfying and rewarding experiences human beings are capable of having.
My own belief is that being “in love” isn’t something distinct and separate from being “not in love” but is part of a scale — say from zero to a hundred. Somewhere along the lower end of the scale would be the feelings a girl has for a boy she likes and sometimes goes out with. But as she knows him better, she goes out with him more often, and she likes him even more, her feelings move upward on the scale until until she feels warm and excited just being with him, she may experience butterflies in the stomach when she sees him and finds herself thinking of him constantly, she wants to be with him as much as possible, and would rather be with him than anyone else. At that point, a girl could say positively with some confidence, “I’m in love.”
That doesn’t mean she’s reached the opposite end of the scale. There may be a distance to go, perhaps, and since love isn’t exactly a fixed and stable emotion, she may go up and down the scale for a time. A girl may still be a long way from the top of the scale, and as she continues going out with him, she’ll find her position probably changes in one direction or another.
It works out better if affection is the beginning of the relationship, with sexual feelings entering the picture later, rather than the other way around. If affection is followed by sexual feelings, a depth of emotion is far from what it was at the beginning. If it was only infatuation, or “puppy love,” it would never have gone so far. Such love comes very quickly and goes quickly, no matter how painful it may seem at the time. Sometimes it happens the first time you see a girl or a boy, but it takes a long time, if ever, for that to develop into the kind of love that’s based on trust, understanding, consideration, and open communication.
At the far end of the scale is love, real love, solid and unmistakable. It’s based on trust, understanding, consideration, and open communication, and it’s very much worth having.
A girl’s sexual feelings for a boy may not lead to intercourse, until she thinks she’s ready for it, but those feelings become important only as they reinforce her total feeling of commitment, trust, and understanding — in a word, love.
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