Underage Dating: The Elephant in the Social Conservative Living-Room
I have a bone to pick with young, socially conservative Americans, and I know it’s something that will get under your skin. Just sit tight, though, and hear me out, because the elephant in our tidy little room is starting to tear things up. It’s time we acknowledge his existence, and maybe even call in some animal movers to take him back to the zoo.
I currently live in a small community in the Bible-belt of the country and I have been given some opportunities to mentor young people from my area through different venues. I can count on one hand the kids I know from the local high school whose parents have never been divorced. I’ve witnessed reactions of genuine surprise and envy from students who hear that my parents are still together. In any given conversation with groups of youth, I can expect to hear continual references to step-parents, step-siblings, and half-siblings. Divorce is a way of life down here – albeit one that has taken its toll in the lives of the young people that will make up the next generation.
However, while I could certainly write extensively on my experience with the negative effects of divorce on children and on society at large, I actually want to address something else entirely. I have concerns about the number one way that our culture chooses to perpetuate the cancer of broken marriages and failed relationships– underage dating.
You can follow them on Facebook – the failed attempts at love, I mean. Somebody is always changing their status from “in a relationship” to “single.” Unfortunately, a huge number of these disappointed lovers are too young to be legally married. I wonder sometimes if I am the only one who winces to hear a thirteen-year old speak with cavalier abandon of his or her “ex?” Since when is it considered healthy and acceptable for underage people to be in “relationships?” Just what do parents and educators expect to be the result of the romantic conquests of these middle-school children and young high school students? The results I’ve witnessed personally are beyond disturbing; they are downright sinister, and have caused me to question whether or not those who claim to champion marital fidelity and family values are paying any attention at all to the standards we are passing to our children.
The trouble with underage dating is that it presents an entirely faulty view of what interaction with the opposite gender should be about. Rather than placing emphasis on building one strong relationship with one person at a stage of life when a marital commitment is feasible, dating encourages young people to pour their energies into consistently seducing other young people at a time when neither of them are capable of making any long-term commitments. Their “relationships” are destined to fail from the get-go because they are founded on unhealthy perceptions of love and not backed by any real necessity to stick it out.
The beauty of marriage, as it was intended to be, is that it teaches two people of opposite genders to learn to work through incompatibilities and give of themselves. In the same way, the great ugliness of dating as it is practiced by our culture and portrayed by our media, is that it teaches two people of opposite genders to be selfish by giving them an easy “out” when things don’t go according to their initial feelings. I believe it is fair to say that this form of dating is a training manual for divorce, because it encourages young people to grow accustomed to giving their hearts away and then taking them back.
Sadly, parents who should know better continue to display shocking naïveté regarding the absurd practices of driving their twelve year olds out on a “date,” or purchasing provocative clothing for their sixteen-year-olds, or sympathizing with their broken-hearted fourteen-year-olds by assuring them that they’ll “find someone better.” “They’re just having fun,” they’ll tell us, rolling their eyes at what they consider to be our tightly wound principles. I work a volunteer shift at Crisis Pregnancy Clinic where I witness every week the ruined lives and broken dreams that “fun” has left with our youth.
Another defense offered for the ridiculous habit of underage dating is that the kids are “just learning how to relate to the opposite sex.” It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure out that what they’re really learning is how to recover quickly from a break-up and set their sights on another gorgeous and equally hormonal person. The culture of dating is a culture of hunger and unsatisfied eyes that are always looking around for affirmation via someone or something else.
But perhaps the most ludicrous and most willfully naïve assertion is that “relationships” between young teens are “not really about sex.” Just what do we think such relationships are about between people too young to be interested in any of the other things (family, stability, home-making, etc. ) that come out of a romantic involvement with the opposite gender? Contrary to such half-baked assurances, it is all about sex for these young people. Whenever they forget that, the pop-culture is quick to remind them of it. In the media, girls are unfailingly presented as having value to boys only in proportion to their physique and their manner of flaunting it. Boys are presented as bestial and incapable of responsibility. Overwhelming, this is the primary message being offered to our kids by the movies, magazines, music artists, and commercials directed at their age group. It is inexcusably irrational for us to suppose that their relationships with one another are untainted by the stereotypes that surround them.
If the situation is so straightforward, why is there not a greater resistance to this cultural trend that trivializes relationships and produces jaded and cynical people who have already been through the warm fuzzies of love and are ready to settle for mere physical gratification by the age of eighteen? Could it be that big-money industries like Justin Bieber and Hannah Montana, who thrive off of exploiting our hormonally charged youth, are partially responsible for throwing the wool over the eyes of so many well-meaning parents? Are sex-education advocates like Planned Parenthood, who profit from purchases of birth control and abortions, throwing money at the movement to desensitize parents to the perils of underage “relationships?” Are we really being duped into sacrificing our kids for the buck?
While social conservatives may proclaim the virtues of pre-marital abstinence and fidelity, their actions don’t line up with their words. They behave as though they expect our young people to embrace or at least abide by the values we preach to them, all the while continuing to direct them in lifestyle choices that foster the opposite principles and attitudes. And we wonder why 95% of Americans admitted to having premarital sex in 2006? Or why it was estimated in 2008 that 40% of all US marriages ended in divorce? Or why 4 in 10 children are born to unwed mothers today? My friends, it’s time for us to wake up and make the connections between the dating scene and the deterioration of the stable American family.
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Bryana Johnson :: Texas A&M University :: Dallas, Texas :: @HighTideJournal
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Excellent article. Most of your points and the replies by readers have, however, missed what should be the most effective alternative to dating for a young person–his family’s involvement. Parents should be inviting/allowing other young people and their respective families to hang out in their homes, circulating in the same circles as their children. Siblings also are invaluable resources in evaluating the character of friends and potential marriage partners. My husband and I have a weekly family council with our children to talk and pray about their friends and recent experiences, and keep communication going. We also loosely follow a courtship model by providing parental oversight and blessing to any relationships that our children are pursuing. So far it has served us well, with three of our five children married in moral purity. It isn’t all rosy and perfect, but it certainly has spared them and us a lot of heartache. I am reasonably confident none of them will divorce, if God gives them grace, because they are committed to lifelong marriage and have good spouses. We pray for them regularly. It’s the best we can do.
I honestly think many of the comparisons drawn to “the good old days” are based on false perceptions of life in those days. First off, I fully support people doing everything they can to save their marriage. I don’t believe in a cut and run lifestyle. However, as bad as a divorce is going to be on a kid, being raised in a home with bitter, resentful and volatile parents is worse. Divorce isn’t ideal, but if a relationship becomes loveless and sour, it’s better than forcing your child to suffer through your problems. In those situations, at least one, if not both parents become more and more emotionally dependent on their child and saddle them with more baggage than they can handle at their age. And if anything, the way to find the person you don’t want to divorce is to date more and understand what you want in a relationship. That doesn’t mean you have to drop your pants for every guy/girl you go out for coffee with. Yes, you should be selfless in a relationship, but that doesn’t mean sacrificing your emotional well being for someone you’re just kind of attracted to. Dating and breaking up isn’t divorce training, it’s coming to understand yourself and the dynamics of romantic relationships. As for the “high school relationships are only about sex” thing, that’s also false. I’ve known people, both older than me and my age, who started dating someone in highschool that they stuck with for a long time, in some cases even married. I’m not saying that all high-school sweethearts are going to become super serious, but there are a few. Dating is a way of understanding both the opposite sex and the dynamics of society. Do I think that 14 or 15 year olds should be having sex? No. But they shouldn’t just shrug off their romantic desires either. If they want to be close to someone, they should go ahead and do that, they just need to be smart and the parents need to both be watchful and actually talk to their kids about what is appropriate. Parenting smartly isn’t about locking your kids in a sheltered world until they’re 18 and then kicking them out, it’s about teaching them.
When the focus of raising children shifted away from raising children of character to viable adulthood and towards the constant persuit of instant gratification we began to lose our children.
Now we are on to the next phase of this tragedy which is losing our rights and our country.
I have to wonder if we have created an intellectual paradigm which mandates that men and women mature at the same rate and should, and must, be held as equals based on their date of birth.
Historically a man took a wife when he could provide for a family (the poor will always be among us, don’t go there), and a family was anxious to get a fertile female out of the house. You can say that was economic, but it was so persistent for so many millennia you surely must think it might just possibly be a norm of the species.
Girls and young women are drawn to babies. My youngest could care for an infant when she was seven. We didn’t teach her that, she just knew it. At twenty she has a State certificate to run a day care. She has an IQ of 65.
My grandmothers were both married to men much their senior, twenty years in the case of my paternal g’mother, almost that much for my maternal.
It’s only in the Northern Hemisphere of the Americas and Western Europe where you find the idea that women should be in their second decade and their mate should be nearly the same age. The rest of the world marries – or mates – to a different timetable.
If you ask my solution to my, perhaps unique, point of view, I don’t have one. But, if you don’t ask the right question there’s no way to get the right answer.
I, a man, married young, and it was a big mistake. My second marriage (I said the first was a big mistake) is to a woman much younger. I do not dominate her by any means, but intellectually we are equals.
I’m just sayin’.
Your comment shows great wisdom – and some historical research. I really think you hit the nail on the head. Just look at all the marriages in the Bible! Isaac was 40, Rebekah 20 or less (we don’t know) when they married. Jacob was at least 60, Rachel who knows (30 or less) when they married. Same with Leah. Joseph was probably 20-30, Mary 15, when they married. The list goes on. Men and women do not come to maturity, physical or emotional, at the same rate. Western dating/marriage culture is also unlike other countries, both then and now. The problem here is the legal age to marry (18). Do I want it younger? No. At the same time, we’ve made babies out of teens. They don’t become marriage material re: maturity until they’re 25…
LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this!! We have been teaching this with our own children and this concept is so foreign to far too many. Wonderfully written!
I have to say I agree wholeheartedly to the atrocity of watching 10 – 13 year olds who have “relationships” and “date”. BUT I have to disagree with the idea that someone underage should not date. I was one of those “picky” teenagers and would not accept an invitation to a dance if I wasn’t interested in a guy, for fear of leading him on. I had a couple of boyfriends, but all that entailed was holding hands in the hall, phone calls and a date to a dance or 2. Because I was so picky and stated, “I’m not interested in dating around, I just want to wait for the ONE, I did just that, waited for a man to sweep me off my feet. I unfortunately met a guy who swept me off my feet at 17. Because I had pretty much zero dating experience I didn’t know what to expect from a relationship and all the subtle signs that I was involved with an abusive man fell on deaf ears as he convinced me all my worries and concerns were because of over controlling parents. The mind set of if you’re truly in love you’ll put in the work to make a relationship work just made me sink further into the abusiveness of this man as he used all my biblical beliefs to guilt me into staying, even when I began to see and feel that something was wrong. If I hadn’t been so serious and gone into dating as if each date/relationship was a “potential marriage” then I may have been able to see it as a way to find out what and who I am within a relationship and I may have been able to get out before I married and had children with this man. The HUGE DANGER of teaching children not to be selfish in a relationship when you’re not getting what you want is that they may hear that asking for what you want or need in a relationship is selfish and that their feelings don’t matter. We need to be very careful when discussing self serving attitudes within a relationship and make sure we teach our children the signs of not just physical abuse, but verbal and emotional…because EVERY physically abusive relationship starts off with verbal and emotional abuse, but not every abusive relationship is physical or becomes physical. And that requiring to be treated with dignity and respect IS NOT SELFISH. Believe me…I’m not encouraging my children to date at a young age, but I’m not discouraging them from going out on a date or two with numerous people before they find themselves in a serious relationship.
Conservative Christians treat dating as though it can ONLY be a precursor for marriage, that you have to consider that you might end up marrying the person you date at 16 and whether or not they are marriage material before you even date them, that you shouldn’t take dating casually, and this may be why dating trains kids for divorce or ignorant submission in marriage. But I think it may be better if dating was not viewed that seriously – if instead dating were viewed as a way to grow and learn about how girls and boys interact and what you can expect from an average/normal boy or girl, and you get to know a wide variety of different girls or boys, and teenagers are not taught to model the intensity of adult relationships with their teen relationships but rather to “date around” (not SLEEP around, just date around, not getting serious or exclusive with a single boyfriend or girlfriend – it is the more serious dating relationships that are likely to involve sex among teens, because the expectation enters after a certain number of dates). Kids become so serious so young about relationships. The expectation that when you go out with someone a couple of times you should then become intense and exclusive is relatively modern. A couple of generations ago, wasn’t it more common to date multiple people in high school? I think it is the exclusivity and intensity of under age dating, not so much the dating itself, that trains for divorce, so that instead of just having fun and going to the dance with a guy and dancing with a few guys, and maybe going to the next dance with a different guy, you have a mini-marriage and a mini-divorce. But it is conservative Christians who trains their kids to look at dating as a kind of betrothal in the first place.
My parents never encouraged me to date when I was young, but they didn’t discourage me either. Not explicitly. What they did instead was “lead by example”. They told me about their dating and relationship history and what had happened with that. Also, they, and my church taught me that “what you practice as a child, you perform as an adult”. That was the most powerful lesson I could have learned. It made me realize that the free and easy dating practices of even my middle school friends what not what I wanted to participate in. At 23, single, and only now just starting to look for a potential husband, I am incredibly grateful for that lesson.
We cannot put all the blame on parents, out of the many teachers and ministers I had in church growing up, there were only a few who taught that powerful message and applied it to more than just the normal “bible study and personal habits” lessons.
I so fit the bill for immaturity–as soon as some guy liked me that I liked, I lost interest (I hated myself so didn’t find anyone who liked me of interest). I didn’t date until in early 20′s, then dated foolishly (whoever asked me out for dinner, movies, etc.) and selfishly; as a Christian I was still a mess emotionally due to deformity and bitter thoughts. Married at age 27, divorced 14 years later from abusive and unfaithful husband. Now I realize what marriage is all about after the fact and am very protective of the marriage bond of others even though I don’t have a husband and dated only a little after the divorce, and then not at all. My parent’s era was dating in groups–getting together for fun events, no serious dating as couples. Mom, age 15, met Dad, age 20 (in college, but shy and committed to his goal of pro boxing); they saw each other on some weekends, wrote lots of letters to each other. Married 64 years. That generation was the last of the innocents in a sense; my generation had Marilyn, Elvis and soon after Beatles and emphasis on sex in speech, clothes, lifestyle. I wore and still wear conservative clothes compared to the short shorts and plunging necklines worn by some women in church–shocking to me to see but no wonder girls are engaged in pursuit of physical attention to lead up to coupling. The cavalier attitude of some is heart breaking as it indicates the lack of spiritual beauty in seeking God’s perfect will of beauty and sexual purity from His perspective, not from the world’s system and standards.
I so agree with and appreciate your last sentence! Thanks for being so articulate.
I realize that my case is unusual, but it still happens. I started dating my husband when I was 15 years old and he was 18 (freshman and senior), we’ve now been together for almost 8 years and married for three and a half. We also have one beautiful little boy. We are both employed full time and I am graduating from college with a degree in Biology in two semesters. We did not have sex while I was in high school. Not all people who date in high school have sex, even when there is an age difference. I think that it really depends on the maturity of those who are dating when it comes to dating in high school. Some are ready and some aren’t. My husbands parents are divorced and they started dating when his father was in Seminary to be a Lutheran minister. Although I agree that some people aren’t mature enough to date in high school (and certainly not middle school), however not every case is the same.
Here is what my fourteenn year old sent to her freind who was pressuring her to get a boyfriend:
All dating is leading up to marriage, it’s preparation for marriage. If I’m not ready to be married then I’m not ready to date. Dating and breaking up is just practicing for divorce. It’s showing you in a relationship that if you hit a problem you just break up. and it’s treaching you that you can do that with marriagge, and why should I date someone and have false feelings and end up getting hurt over nothing?
She’s got it right and so do you!
That is so awesome! My daughter who is soon to be 15, (mature beyond her years everyone thinks she is 17) thinks and feels the exact same way as your daughter. She is friends with a few guys that she tries to get to know and works on making close friends to consider what she wants in a mate when she is ready to date. We have taught her you don’t date just for fun because it isn’t a game. As she becomes better friends with guys she can compare and see what she likes and dislikes in guys so she knows what she wants to find in a husband when that time comes. Her and her brother who is two years older than her do things together in groups with both male and female high school and early college age kids making close friends and lifelong friendships not worrying about dating so when the time comes she will be looking for a husband not just guys to have fun with. Besides in group setting when everyone is focused on being friends the true person seems to come out a lot easier than when one is dating and trying to impress each other.
I think it’s somewhat absurd to say that teen relationships are all about sex. Maybe the high school ones, but then again high school is a time to explore sexual boundaries and such… at least in my opinion. Middle schoolers and elementary aged children are only following what older people are doing, just as two children would play house. There’s nothing wrong with “underage dating”, it’s a time where teens can actually get to know each other without the stresses of bills and real life… they are gaining skills and learning how to communicate with prospective partners (and by that I mean any prospective boy:boy, girl:girl, boy:girl), because this is the time in young people’s lives when they being having strong sexual feelings… it’s natural. You can’t change nature.
Um…NO. As a recent graduate of public schooling, I can tell you that it is NOT those girls who have early romantic relationships who are best capable of interacting with those of the opposite sex. Those girls are often shallow, depressed or frustrated by the state of their relationships, and have more interest in fashion than academia. They also cannot talk to a boy without flirting or fighting. The ones who I’ve seen are best adjusted to real society are those who, like me, have independent passions and are able to share these in a non-romantic, asexual manner. Like my friend B on the FIRST Robotics team (now studying mechanical engineering and in a steady, long-term, long-distance relationship with one of the sweetest guys from our high school). Or my other friend E who actually had a number of dating fiascoes during high school, but stuck to her dance, family, and God as being more important. She just celebrated her first anniversary married to a wonderful guy who’s like an older brother to mine. Or myself. I’m beginning to find I might just have the strength it takes to be single my entire life and yet I’ve always been known to have male friends. We often bond over tomboyish subjects, such as Star Wars, burning/exploding stuff, detective novels, or the impossibility of understanding why so many girls spend so much time/money on make up and clothes.