quote: I don't believe in "going steady" in high school, or in exclusive relationships until you're an adult.
I don't mean to nitpick, and i'm sure most kids would understand the difference...but isn't encouraging dating multiple persons at one time just like encouraging promiscuity? Certainly sex doesn't have to be involved, but i would be totally afraid of seeing a guy who declared that he was seeing 5, 6 other girls besides me.
And, just to bring up an interesting point, I don't think forbidding dating will necessarily protect your children from relationship-related heart-break. Ever heard of infatuation? Cause I sure as heck did and crushed on the same guy (too old to date me) for over a year when i was twelve. Ended up breaking my heart, and we never "dated exclusively" nor, according to him, dated at all. How are you going to keep your children from wanting to be romantic with someone? They're going to have those feelings, even if they understand that they're not to act on them...they're still going to exist!
Knowing that I wasn't going to be able to have a relationship with a 15 year old didn't stop me from really, really liking him.
~*~*~*~
Dating in high school helped me suss out what I did and did not want in a relationship. I realized that personality was 3,000 times more important than looks, for starters.
i'd type more but i have to teach! Posts: 3516 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think kat was talking about "social dating". Someone else here said they did not think of such activities as dating at all. More like one guy and one girl doing something together. Or "group dating" where there is an equal number of girls and guys. Pretty casual. Not about romance.
Posts: 7050 | Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
I'd be fascinated to know, of all lifetime dating, what the general percentage is for second and third dates after a first date.
Someone dating 6 people who all think they are exclusive is promiscuous. Someone with four first dates in one weekend, in which you simply talk, do whatever, and don't mack on each other, is having a great weekend in high school.
Maybe it's about expectations? If your expectations are that every date leads to a relationship, then just asking someone out is, in a way, something of a committment. If your expectation is to have a fun social experience, maybe make a friend, have a good day, or simply flirt, isn't that the point of dating as a teenager?
quote: Risk is an important part of life and if you too afraid of letting your kids take risks, they'll suffer.
I agree totally and completely with this. I'm not saying kids need to take risks like... say... bungee jumping off of bridges or having unprotected sex with many anonymous partners, but they should be able to go out on a limb and have their heart broken sometimes. For me, I haven't taken many risks at all and I think I'm worse off for it. Read on...
quote: I agree, but why is dating at all necessary until you are ready to pair off? What do you get from dating that you cannot get from social interaction in a group setting?
All I know is what I DIDN'T get from not having been in a romantic relationship. It's difficult for a person who interacts socially the way I do to get people to tell them they're attractive. I refuse to say that not dating gives people low self-esteem, but I can say that the fact that I was available and no one came after me did nothing to help my self-esteem.
I'd call myself a late bloomer. I didn't start having serious crushes on guys until probably... Oh no wait. OK, so I'm not a late bloomer, necessarily. I had a fairly serious crush on a guy in Freshman year, but boy was that a pathetic crush. He was very cute, nice, and he had vision problems so I thought he could overlook my hideousness... Gag. So much low self-esteem. But anyway, I digress.
I think I'm worse off for never having had a relationship, because I don't know for the life of me how to get involved with someone. I wouldn't know how to start or what to do... And that's something people expect you to know in college. So I'm looking at hard times if ever I do get into a relationship.
quote: We should teach our children to understand and control their emotions. We expect them to control their anger,their greed, their excitement, their honesty, and their altruism-- we should also teach them to control their instinct toward romantic love.
I'm going to hide now, because this is me. (hides)
quote:It's nice to talk about acceptable risk for children, but the application of those ideologies is something else entirely. What Tresopax non-parents define as acceptable risk, parents know to be idealistic nonsense.
Know? I think you mean believe. (And only some parents at that.) And I think many parents are going to be a bit biased on the issue, since the natural instinct is to avoid risk when you have something very important at stake.
posted
Kat, I think it depends very much on the personalities involved. My sister and I, raised in the same house by the same parents, with the same rules, had completely opposite views on dating. I never would have gone on a date with more than one person in a weekend. Or in a week. (Lately, not more than one person in a decade.) Because I’ve always looked at dating as being about finding someone to be with long-term. LJ enjoys “recreational” dating and probably would have been very happy to go on lots of first dates. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that she has at some point dated more people in a single week than I have in my entire life. (That may be hyperbole, but I’m not sure.)
I’m happy in a committed relationship. I dated two guys in high school – went on two dates with the first one, and dated the second for three years. Would have married him too, except I realized, once we got to college, that I was only dating him because I was comfortable in a long term relationship, not because I was in love with him.
Posts: 9866 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
When you say sleepovers, all you people who are worried about sleepovers, do you mean co-ed, two people only, big group sleepovers of a single gender, or all sleepovers?
Is your kid allowed to have a sleepover?
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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I didn't date a ton in high school, but from 16 to 21, I went on an average one first date a month/month-and-a-half. I didn't date anyone for longer than three weeks until I was twenty, and didn't date anyone for longer two months until I was back from my mission. There were some quirky stories in there - I had one guy ask me out every six months for almost five years. If you see each other once every six months, it's a first date every frequin' time. *grins*
Why I didn't date any for longer... well, by college, most were either pre-mission, so they left fairly soon, or else they were back from their missions and wife-hunting in a serious way. If anything, I wish I had dated more in high school than I did, because when you start as an adult, you're still just as...awkward, but the stakes are high. They are playing for keeps.
I quite enjoyed being able to have fun and flirt when the stakes weren't quite as high.
"Date" as a verb in all of the above being a very loose term.
posted
Xap -- you assume that people's opinions change when they become parents because they have forgotten what they knew when they are kids.
I say it is the opposite. It is because we have learned things that we didn't know when we were kids. I have not forgotten how frustrated I was with my parents. I hated the rules I had to follow. But as I have said in other posts, I now realize how much more of a disaster my life would have been it if hadn't been for the rules my parents managed to enforce.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
From the ages of 15 to 22 or so, I dated continuously; every week, almost without exception, I went out with SOMEONE. Obviously, I was in committed relationships for some of this time; at other times, I was "dating" as many as three or four people at once, just because I enjoyed their company and liked discussing movies with them between kisses or something. There are times when this approach didn't work out, but my experience was that the really BAD relationships, the ones I slightly regret, were all some of the long-term and monogamous ones; the "hung out with Julie four or five times" relationships never left either of us the worse for wear, as far as I can tell. I traveled a lot when I was younger, too, and made a point of finding an attractive local to hang out with wherever I went -- again, mainly for the company and entertainment. There was obviously nothing long-term expected, but it was nice anyway.
So I sometimes have trouble understanding the whole "dating is for finding a mate, and nothing else" mentality, since it's clearly not one that I or the girls I dated shared. That's not to say that some of these dates didn't eventually turn into longer relationships -- but why saddle a budding friendship with that kind of leaden pressure so early?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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