Teaching Teens About Authentic Love

“You don’t know what real love is!”

How many teenagers have heard this statement from their parents?  I know I did.  While parents may be right in this statement, it is unfair to treat teenagers as if they don’t know, especially when parents haven’t taught their kids what real love is.

I was a late bloomer.  I had zero interest in boys as a young teen and I wasn’t allowed to date until I was sixteen anyway, so I didn’t even really bother with boys, dating, and all that jazz.  But, once I became a sophomore in high school, I finally gave in to the boy who had been pursuing me for years.  And when I dove in, I dove with a swan dive topped off with a triple twist and all.  Except…I hit the water like a two-by-four and the wake of the splash overtook me.  I was completely and totally unprepared to handle his rejection of me.  And I loved him.  At least, I thought I did, because I had all the feelings and that’s what love is right?  Eh, yes….and no.

See, most teens get their understanding of love from watching movies.  Boy sees girl, she smiles coyly, they are attracted, and it’s love ever after.  They want to breathe each other’s air, can’t live five seconds without stroking each other’s face, and the butterflies are all a fluttering in the tummy.  Love…true love (You must say that like the preacher in Princess Bride).  Teens think that all these feelings are what real love is and who can blame them?  Nobody teaches them otherwise.  We teach kids how to drive, how to take a test, how to work at a job, but with dating and love we just tell them “have fun!” and unleash them to the world.  And then when they show up broken-hearted and feeling like they can’t breathe, we tell them that they are immature and “just don’t know what love is.”  That’s unfair.

We have to talk with our kids about what authentic love is.  All authentic love has one basic component–to will the good of the other.  This doesn’t matter if you are talking about love between friends, the love of a parent for a child, the love we should have with our fellow man, and even romantic love.  Now each of these loves is displayed differently and with romantic love there is usually physical attraction.  But, the attraction aspect is not what defines romantic love.  Sadly, in our world we have love all confused, especially in the romantic department.  We think that the initial feelings are proof positive that we really love someone. Unfortunately, when those feelings go away and subside, we feel that we have “fallen out of love.”  So, we go seeking those feelings again and again and repeating the same storyline over and over.

When my first boyfriend was over me (which took all of five seconds), I was not over him.  Looking back now, I realize that I couldn’t understand how he could tell me that he loved me, yet not want me anymore.  That was confusing.  It broke my heart and I was devastated.  In reality, I wanted to cling to him because I needed to prove to myself that, yes, I was lovable.  When he broke up with me, I hid in my room with the lights turned off and bawled my eyes out.  A lot of people told me to just get over it and move on, but none of this helped.  My heart felt too heavy to believe that I didn’t really understand love.

As I lay on my bed, my dad came into my room and sat by my side.  He didn’t say much to me, just asked a couple questions and rubbed my head.  He didn’t tell me I was wrong for feeling this way or to just hop up and get on with life.  He acknowledged my feelings and let me work through them.  I needed that.  This is a great lesson for us parents out there raising kids right now.  We have to acknowledge their feelings and help them work through them.  But, most importantly, we can’t expect them to understand something that we haven’t taught them.

There are three things that I think we have to discuss when it comes to romantic love.  We need to have these conversations with our kids before they reach teenage years.  Once they’ve reached pre-teen years we aren’t changing diapers anymore or helping them with every little need.  We move into a place where we are teaching, guiding, directing, and advising on bigger issues.

1.  Love is not about how that person makes you feel.  Every person that you will claim to love in your life will at times make you unhappy, angry, or sad.  Real love does not give up on that person when those hard times come.  Your boyfriend/girlfriend’s job is not to make you happy or feel good.  Too many people give up on their marriage, because the other spouse has ceased to make them “feel good.”  People abandon marriages all the time, because the good feelings are gone.  It’s important to understand that love, real love, does not give up when the going gets tough.  Otherwise, what’s to admire about love?  What’s the big deal about love if it’s fickle and weak?
2. You cannot make someone love you.  I did not understand this.  I turned myself inside and out and back again for my first boyfriend all in an attempt to find that version of “me” that he might love.  It doesn’t work that way.  Love cannot be forced, it must be given freely or it isn’t love.  To add to that, if someone can’t love you for you, why would you want to force them?  Would you ever really feel loved?  No.  No you wouldn’t.  You would always question their love and that’s a miserable place to be.  Now, I want to be very clear here–while real love loves the person, that does not mean that they are required to love everything you like or that they have to accept and tolerate bad behaviors.  You can love a person fully while having different opinions.  You can love a person fully, but desire to guide them away from sins.
3. Authentic love wills the good of the other.  We need to teach our teens that real love will not try to knowingly lead you into sin or bad situations.  It always puts the other first.  My first boyfriend never put me first in anything.  I was made to feel small in his presence and that should have been a red flag.  More than that; it should have been a trumpet blaring from a mountain top surrounded by thousands of red flags.  But, I had the feelings, you know.  So, this had to be love.  What I had to learn was that love walks alongside the other.  No one gets left behind; no one is left to feel forgotten.

My mother was right.  I didn’t know what real love was, but I also didn’t know how to understand it.  The reality is that I had finally decided to give in to a pursuer and as soon as I did, I became like last year’s pop news–forgotten.  This stung my heart.  The sting hurt so badly that I thought this intense feeling meant that I surely loved him.  In reality, my pride had been trampled over.  It made me question my desirability and lovability.  I thought, that if I could just get him to love me, then I would feel better.  And at times, I could get him to cast me a few crumbs off his plate which I quickly ate up.  Yet…I never felt better.  What I’ve realized after all this time is that I was trying so hard to get him to make me happy.  I was really only thinking of myself and how I felt and how he could potentially make me feel.  I think he subconsciously felt my neediness and suffocating pressure and it made me unattractive.  We cannot burden people with the impossible task of making us perfectly happy.

In contrast, when I met my husband, I wanted nothing more than to work for his happiness my whole life.  I knew that I would fail at times, but I wanted that opportunity.  It was him I was thinking about and not so much myself.  I wanted to love him through this life with all his faults and failings.  I wanted to be at his side through all the trials of life.  The beautiful thing is that he wanted that with me, too.  Make no mistake, we’ve grown a lot in this department and our understanding of love, but that initial desire–to will the good of the other–was there.

Matters of the heart are not a joke.  They can leave scars that can take a lifetime to stop hurting.  Even when they seem healed, they still throb from time-to-time.  We must help our kids understand love, not just leave it up to Disney to educate them.  Will we be able to keep them from all heart-ache and sorrow?  No, but that doesn’t mean we don’t try.