A parent's thoughts about teen love

The Global Early Adolescent Study (GEAS) found that adolescents between 10 and 14 in Blantyre engage in romantic relationships. Some already initiate sex.

Teen love can be a positive experience as part of growing up. In this blog, I share thoughts about how teens can make the best of this experience.

Positions of parents on teen love

The permissive parent

This parent believes sex is okay if it is what the teen wants. Sex does not need to aim to create a special bond with the sexual partner. Who the teen has sex with is no big deal. What is important is that sex is not forced and is safe.

The middle-position parent

This parent believes that the teen should only engage in sex with a partner with whom they are in love. Sex is a special act and should not just be for the physical experience. Of course, sex should not be forced and should be safe.

The conservative parent

Sex is reserved only for marriage. It is always wrong for two people who are not married to engage in sex.

My position

I take the middle position that sex should only be between people in love, but I would not insist that they first be in a marriage relationship.

I believe that parents owe their children an honest conversation about their position regarding love and sex. But at the end of the day, the teen will have to choose how they will live their love and sex life.

Love and relationships

Love is not an emotion or feeling, though emotions and feelings are part of love. Love is a commitment to care about another person and the wish that the other person also commits to caring about us. A love relationship is usually initiated by one person to which the other responds. It is from here that a love relationship will flourish.

Emotions, feelings and desires are part of relationship chemistry. Emotions lead us to the person we find likeable and attractive and a potential lover. We do not have control over the emotions that show us who attracts us. It just happens that we discover that we find someone likeable and attractive. These feelings can be intense and 'knock us off our feet'. However, we have control over how to react to such feelings, whether to initiate steps to establish a special bond with the person or to let it go.

Establishing a love relationship requires letting the other person know that we like them and hoping they will like us back. However, people we find attractive and like may not like us back. This is a reality of life, and nothing is wrong with that. We will sometimes be disappointed in our quest for love, but that should not stop us from seeking love.

The gender aspect

Social expectations create different expectations about how girls and boys should behave. Sometimes these expectations are not helpful. They are not the truth about life. They are creations of society and culture.

So, for example, in our context, girls are not supposed to propose love to boys. A girl who proposes love to a boy is perceived as out of place. On the other hand, boys are expected to propose love to girls, and sometimes, they can be aggressive because boys are expected to demonstrate that they are real men by getting a girl interested in them.

Sometimes, a girl may like a boy but miss the chance to express this because they feel society will judge them if they take the first steps. On the other hand, boys may also be scared to propose to girls for fear of rejection. I know from experience that we sometimes use alcohol to gain the courage to talk to girls. That is why most love proposals, for example, at university campuses, are made at parties when boys are drunk. But it is not only alcohol that boys use. They can also use religion and claim that some divine power has led them to propose to the girl they like.

Building friendships

Falling in love involves taking the chance to reach out to another person and let them know that we like them. Girls and boys can both do this by reaching out. Social expectations should not hinder teens from expressing feelings to those they like. Yes, there is always the possibility of disappointment because reaching out to another person does not mean they will respond positively. However, one must accept this disappointment as a normal part of life and not feel devasted when a love proposal is ignored or refused.

This is why self-esteem and self-confidence are important. A person with high self-esteem does not perceive rejection or disappointment as a crushing defeat or a fatal blow to one's ego. Rejection, much as it is painful, is but an opportunity to move forward in life.

It is also essential to not just focus on finding love. The tactic is to make friends with many people to create opportunities to meet people among those we already know, but also to make new connections through existing friends. Sometimes, chance encounters connect us with people we have never met before. Therefore, while we might be interested in finding love, it is okay to take it easy and work toward widening our friendship base.

Knowing oneself

An important aspect of friendship is knowing our friend. Knowing each other builds the bonds of friendship. This is also important in love relationships. It is impossible to commit to caring about the other person when we do not know them. Knowing them means getting to talk and communicate about who we are deep down there. Knowing ourselves is central to love. Our ability to give or receive love is limited if we do not know ourselves.

What is knowing oneself, one may ask? Knowing oneself is about understanding who we are. However, we cannot know ourselves by the thought process alone. It is through our feelings that we can know ourselves. It is about getting in touch with our innermost feelings. It is about knowing what we want and those things we care about

The idea of knowing oneself might sound abstract and philosophical, but it is worth understanding. We cannot directly know our innermost being. We cannot know ourselves only through some rational analysis of who we are. We can only know ourselves indirectly through our spontaneous emotional reactions to the world around us.

Let me give you an example. Imagine yourself in a place full of your peers. You are likely to find someone to who you are attracted. Now think about what kind of people attract you, or you find likeable. That moment of reflection provides you with a window to understand something about yourself. To know more about knowing oneself, read this article by Racheal Pace.

Knowing your partner

Now, love is about knowing our partner and the partner knowing us. It involves communicating and opening up to one another. The relationship is a process of progressive opening up to one another. Typically, we do not just all at once open up about ourselves. It is impossible anyway because it is our human condition that we cannot know ourselves fully at any time. Even if we did, we tend not to be comfortable revealing ourselves to our partner all at once. Even your parents in a marriage relationship continuously discover each other as they go along and encounter new experiences each day.

Feelings of attraction

The first feelings of attraction to the person we care about only get us started. But when we decide to commit, the feelings of attraction fall into the background. It is like a smartphone app that is not visible but continues to work in the background. Sometimes the feelings of attraction will surface, only to recede again. If love were just feelings of attraction, it would always be like an emotional rollercoaster. However, love is not an emotion. It is a commitment. That carries us through the times when the relationship is on the rocks, and the feelings we experience are mostly negative, such as anger, shame, and resentment.

Loving ourselves

Love can develop and grow from an existing friendship or a novel one. When one becomes acquainted with a potential lover, the process of nurturing, that is, of knowing one another begins. But it never ends. Even for us, parents, knowing our partner must deepen every day, or the relationship will run dry.

This is why it is essential to take care of ourselves. Nurturing ourselves enables us to make positive choices about our love commitments. Loving ourselves or self-love is the basis of loving the person with who we are in love. Also, knowing and nurturing ourselves can help us understand when a friendship we thought was a love affair is no longer loving, and we need to end the affair.

The place of sex

Engaging in sex before knowing the other person can get us into a tricky situation because we develop a strong physical bond with someone we do not know. This is why I believe it is important to work on developing a friendship before engaging in sex. If we feel pressured into sex by a person who says they care about us, it may indicate that the person is interested in the sex but not us.

So, as I said, I take a middle position. I believe teens can form love relationships. But I think teens should delay sex until they are comfortable that they have built an emotional bond with the person they care about and that the person also cares about them.

Concluding thoughts

Whether the teen has already found love or is looking or waiting, the basis of love is the same: First, know yourself. Second, make friends. Third, take chances and let people we find attractive or likeable know that we like them. Fourth, do not fear rejection too much. It is part of life. We should courageously take our chances and move on.