Learning the Boyfriend/Girlfriend Rules

I try not to pay much attention to gossip, my desire for privacy regarding my personal affairs leading me to believe that others deserve it as well, but every once in a while something catches my ear and causes me to take notice. This was the case recently when news of a new romance reached me, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

It’s a third grade romance, so I’m not really sure what that entails, but is noteworthy for being this particular friend of my daughter’s first. Alaina herself has had two previous boyfriends but in the past year has firmly embraced a pro-female, sisters before misters, boys have cooties mentality.

She didn’t hear that from me. Even though I know that most of it is meant in jest and shouldn’t be taken seriously I don’t think we do our children, boys or girls, any favors by perpetuating the dad on the front porch with a shotgun archetype. I was once a cocky, horny, asshole of a young man and I can tell you that any father that tried to intimidate me just made me re-double my efforts to do naughty things to his daughter. It sounds horrible because it was. I had a lot of female friends and think that for the most part I was pretty respectful but I had a certain thing on my mind at pretty much all times and to ignore that fact serves no purpose.

It also serves no purpose to ignore the fact that I had willing partners in those adventures and that for every heart that I broke there was a girl that had me listening to Chicago cassettes and later on sitting around campfires with nothing but Bud Light, George Strait songs and my buddies to help me turn the page on chapters in my romantic history. Thirty years later the beer is a bit better but the buddies and the songs are the same.

My daughter is going to have her heart broken, just as her older sister has, her mother has and everybody has at some point. Nothing I can do can stop that, just as I can’t stop many of the other things that she is going to experience as she makes her way in the world. There are also going to be toxic friends, deaths of those she knows and loves, disappointments in so many people and things. As much as I would give anything to spare her these pains and take them on myself in her stead that just isn’t how it works.

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I think that maybe dads make these jokes for different reasons, guilt about how we looked at girls in our youth being one of them, but also because it’s a way to pretend that we have some control. There is so much that terrifies me, that keeps me up at night trying to find ways to help her avoid it, that I can see the appeal to thinking that I can control this aspect of her life.

That control aspect is kind of what makes this so bad though, guys. What we are actually saying, albeit by accident, is that we don’t trust our girls to make good decisions, that they need a man ( us ) to decide who is an acceptable match for them. Even more dangerous is that we are saying that boys are incapable of controlling these urges and bad intentions that they have towards our daughters unless we threaten them with violence and “anything you do to her, I do to you.” Not only do kids take things much more literally than we intend but I think that sometimes they are more capable of seeing through our “joking around” to realize that there is an unconscious bias there than we realize.

At this point any boyfriend or girlfriend that these kids have is just another way of playing make believe, no different from when my daughter pretends to be her friend’s mom or sister. Sometimes she even pretends to be their dog.

Instead of recoiling at the idea, maybe we should be using it as a teachable moment. They all know that whoever is the parent or teacher in their game is the boss, let’s give them some rules for boyfriend/girlfriend as well. Let’s let them know that to have a boyfriend or girlfriend means being nice to them, that they aren’t allowed to tease or be mean. Let’s let them know that part of the job is to stick up for each other when others are teasing or being mean. Let’s tell them that they only get one at a time and they aren’t supposed to feel sad around you.

I’m perfectly content being my daughter’s Valentine for as long as she wants and count myself fortunate to not be branded as a cootie carrier but I know that eventually she is going to experience all of the ups and downs that romance can bring on her own. If she’s able to find somebody able to follow these rules I think that’s a pretty good start.