Mar 8

How to talk about dating with teenagers?

Adolescence is one of the most beautiful stages of our lives, which includes many questions and discoveries. Teenagers are at a stage where they stop doing many things that are considered for children and incorporate those of adults.

Among these activities we find feeling attracted to a person, wanting to have a more solid romance, being more curious about sexuality, that is, experiencing love in another way. For parents, it can be a time of great concern, especially because they do not know if the choice of partner they will have will be the best for their well-being. The reality is that this area will depend entirely on them, so as parents we have to respect and provide them with tools, so they can act in a more functional way. But then how can I talk to a dating teenager? In this post, we will go through some points that we consider are essential to discuss the subject and be able to have significant results. Let’s see.

1. Agree on a specific day and time.

It is proven that in order to open a space of trust, especially with a teenager, predisposition is needed.

Plan and agree on a time when neither of you have things to do, that you can enjoy. From this moment you are sending a message of mutual respect and affection to your teenager.

They can prepare or be accompanied by something they like to talk about quietly.

2. Eternal love and better half.

The first point that we recommend you address with your son or daughter is the concept of romantic love and all its derivatives, such as the idea of eternal love and the better half. It is a subject that definitely hurts to accept, more so in your first relationships, since love is not eternal, it changes and, even more importantly, it is built. It is not about placing the couple as a being destined to be born only to love us forever. Actually, anyone can be that love, as long as you work as a team and coincide in moments and ideals. It is also a responsibility.

Try not to impose the idea on him directly, because he may take it badly. Better analyze what aspects are needed for a relationship to last, so that they could continue together until adults, get married, etc. He also talks about the thousand alternative possibilities to that, such as being boyfriends now and then meeting again, being boyfriends and then deciding what is better as friends, etc.

Move that imagination a bit with your teenager, breaking up with someone is not the end of happiness and it is possible to be with or without a partner. It is about understanding that this is relative, that the couple is not the one that comes to complement us, but rather someone with whom one share, but one is already complete by oneself.

3. Jealousy is not a sign of love.

Really like any behavior, jealousy is learned and supported by social learning. The belief that the other is our property can lead us to very big problems. Let us remember that the phrase “jealousy is a sign of love” is where violent relationships are born, where the person is isolated, not only from friends but also from family, work environment, school, etc.

Explain that he can feel them, but it’s his job to learn to deal with them. Understand where they come from, what lies behind them, and what you will do with them. Jealousy is a sign of everything except pure love.

It also doesn’t mean that they don’t love if they feel it, but let’s avoid it as a sign of tenderness or a pretext to feel special because the partner is jealous. Jealousy has been classified as a form of violence, according to many investigations, and is found hand in hand with behaviors such as hurtful jokes, blackmail, lies, deception, cold law, disqualification.

Although they are considered to be part of the lowest grades in the violence meter, they have a predisposition to be scalable towards other more obvious or unpleasant behaviors.

4. Love can and endures everything.

This is also an indicator that can lead them to extreme situations. To say that love literally endures everything is a very strong phrase. We are just talking about enduring everything, which can include violence, pain, discomfort, destruction of happiness, and personality.

Let’s remember that you start with things that seem small, fight daily, then yell at each other daily, underestimate yourself, hits, etc.

Sometimes the healthiest thing is to learn to respect that things also have an end: An end that can represent the beginning of another stage.

It is about learning a little about emotional responsibility and taking love as a responsibility, an agreement, but not as a punishment or something that should hurt.

5. Gender issues.

The genre largely crosses these already mentioned learnings about romantic love. Women tend to internalize these points and take them to the letter. While not all women do all the learning, many may be reproducing it without being fully aware of the consequences.

This is because they are taught all this from an early age, for example, they are required to be calm, not visceral, do not use physical force, be delicate, listen well and speak little, etc. preparing them to later be right in the couple’s arguments, be the ones who keep calm, the ones who solve the problem, because the man “can’t control his emotions”, etc. These learnings, which in the end are myths, lead above all to dynamics of violence. It is important to remember that he can live it from his first relationships in adolescence. It is then that whether our adolescent is a man or a woman, we must return responsibility for him and make him aware of his relationship.

6. Set red flags and limits

Once you have gone through all these actions that can harm a relationship and your own well-being, get down to work. Set up red flags, that is, talk about when it is no longer appropriate to be with a person, whoever they are. What is he not going to allow or get to do in order to be with this person, always putting self-love and healthy construction first. What characteristics should your partner have?

If possible, do it on a piece of paper, in writing it will be less likely to be forgotten. To make the exercise more interesting, you can also do it for yourself, so you can discover many things together and have more confidence.

7. Talking about sexuality in courtship

This is an issue that worries many parents, especially when it is known that they already have a partner. We recommend you return to this topic, together with the question of talking about contraceptives with your teenager on another occasion, since this talk will open the opportunity to do so, so almost at the end of the talk, raise the possibility of talking about this topic on another occasion. , because we do not want to stun it in a single day.

Allow him to process all of this information and then move on to the area of sexuality. In this topic you should include, above all, emotional responsibility, respect for one’s own body and that of the other, where sexuality is not only about sex, but about affective, social and emotional aspects.

We hope this post will be very helpful to you. It is about releasing taboos a little and establishing a calm conversation, but above all one of respect since it is a very important issue for your son or daughter.