Who Says You Have to Have a Boyfriend? By Cathryn Jakobson
|
||
 |
Everyone. Constantly. Well, they're wrong. Here's how to handie all that pair pressure
I couldn't have been more than a year old when it started. My mom and Billy Solomon's mom would stick us in our strollers, push us to the park, and dump us in the sandbox. Billy'd try to kiss me on the neck, and I'd try to tear out his hair. "Oh, look how beautifully they play together," my mother would say to Mrs. Solomon. "Maybe they'll go out on dates. Maybe they'll get married someday."
It's no wonder, given this early training, that I grew up thinking that finding a boy of my own was of paramount importance; that not having one was a sign of pathetic failure. My mother, a social butterfly in her youth, was convinced that if I didn't have dates by the time I was fifteen I was destined to become an old maid. My grandmother, bless her, used to tell me-a girl who was happiest with her nose stuck in a book-not to get too smart, because the boys wouldn't like me. From appearances-no dates, no boyfriend-it seemed she was right. The truth was, books were much more interesting than the boys I knew. The romantic figures I found in novels bore little relation to the short, scuzzy geeks in my tenth grade class. It was obvious to me that I couldn't discuss the really important stuff-horses, movie stars, whether it was better (in theory, of course) to lose your virginity to an older boy with experience or one your own age-with any of the males I knew.
The prospect of having an actual, live boyfriend, of sitting on a boyfriend's lap--like Lisa Green did, right out in front of everybody, right in the cafeteria-was, to me, completely paralyzing. As far as I was concerned, boys were creatures from another planet. I did not feel good about this. It terrified me. What was my problem? I assumed that same deep defect kept me from going out and getting for my very own what I thought all real girls wanted. Why wasn't I urgently hunting for a boyfriend?
The fact is, I was too much in the middle of the muddle to realize that not everyone has to have a boyfriend. I was too close to the trauma of having to ask my brother's best friend to take me to the prom to think of asking my mother why exactly I had to have a boyfriend. It wasn't until college (where I had a hectic social life, I might add) that I realized there are same excellent reasons not to get obsessed with boys before you 're ready.
Our society tells us that we must have a ma!e we can call our own. We get pressure from parents, friends, television, romance novels, magazines, movies-not to mention our own bodies. Society tells us that we have to have boyfriends, in the same way it insists that we use toothpaste and deodorant and hair conditioner.
Well, we needn't swallow this dictum whole, you know. It might be enlightening to explode some of the popular boyfriend myths.
Myth #1: Having a boyfriend will make you feel secure.
That's what Lisa Harton, seventeen, of Charleston, South Carolina, thought until her boyfriend of two years broke up with her a few weeks before graduation. ..I found out that a lot of my sense of myself was tied up with him," she says. 'I'd spent so much time with him that I hadn't had a chance to really develop as a person. It was always Lisa-and-Michael, never just Lisa. And we spent so much time focusing on his problems-like his fights with his fat her-that I never thought much about what was bothering me."
When Michael told her he wanted to split up, she felt as if somebody had cut off a part of her body. "The worst part was that it had been two years since I'd spent any time alone with my girlfriends," she says, "and they'd stopped calling me to go to the movies." Lisa had a couple of lonely months and skipped her senior prom because she had no one to go with. "The girls who weren't really dating anybody just teamed up with guys who were their friends," says Lisa, "but by the time Michael and I broke up everybody was matched up and there was no one de cent left for me." Lisa says she's not going to hook up with anybody else soon.
"What I want is a little time to figure out who I am, without Michael. I think too many girls are too dependent on having a boyfriend. But you have to be happy with yourself."
Myth #2: To convince your family that you aren't a total loser, you need a boyfriend.
Stacey Carver, seventeen, of Rochester, New York, has experience with this one. Her mother wanted her to stop hanging out at the stables and start dating like other girls-unless, of course, she intended to marry a horse. At family gatherings, her uncles and aunts winked at her and asked if she was "seeing anyone special. " The pressure drove her crazy. As far as she was concerned, it was hopeless: She was just too shy around boys.
Then, the summer before eleventh grade, Stacey worked as a day camp counselor-and fell in love with Sam, who taught swimming and was four years older. She brought him home. certain her parents would be delighted. They weren't. "it was amazing," she says. "They didn't like anything about him. They didn't like the sports car he drove, they didn't like his leather jacket, they didn't like his manners. Just because he didn't act like same loser high school kid. He didn't grovel at my father's feet; he shook hands, like a man.
All of a sudden there were dozens of rules about when I could go out and when I had to get back, and my mother would stay up and turn on the lights when we drove in the driveway so poor Sam would have to kiss me good night in a flood of light. My brother told him he would blow him out of his boots if he laid a hand on me, which sounded suspiciously like something he might have heard from my father. And of course, when he went back to college, I wasn't allowed to go out and visit him. I really couldn't blame him when he found another girlfriend."
Myth #3: You need a boyfriend so you'll have dates on the weekend.
"Once you start going out with someone, you instantly get into 'how of ten and how exclusive' problems," says Kelly Larsen, fifteen, of St. Paul. "And sometimes people have different ideas about what 'going out' means. I just broke up with a guy who went nuts if I wanted to go to the pool with my friends. He thought I ought to spend all my free time with him. From now on I'm going to play the field. I think I'm too young to get tied down like that."
Laurie Howard, sixteen, of Long Beach, California, got bored with the routine of dating one guy: "You get in a rut really fast," she says. "You always go out Friday and Saturday nights. You always go over to his house on Saturday. And after a while, it gets tedious. You would rather go shopping with a girlfriend, but you know he expects you to be with him. And these things can go on and on, long after they should stop, because of some event that's looming, like the senior dance. You don't want to break up anytime right before it because you won't have anyone to go with. So you stick together and go together and hate every minute of it, and wish you had the freedom to dance with some other guys."
Myth #4: if you don't have a boyfriend, you must be unattractive.
I was thoroughly convinced in high school that I was the ugliest duckling in that vast brick building. My mother told me I was pretty, my father told me I was going to look just like Katharine Hepburn when I grew up, and I thought that both of them were full of it. My reasoning? I had no boyfriend, and if I didn't have a boyfriend it meant that boys weren't attracted to me, and if boys weren't attracted to me it meant that I was ugly. I'll never forget the rainy afternoon when David-a chubby guy who was uncool enough to play the bassoon-told me that in his opinion I was the only girl in the school who had the legs to do justice to a miniskirt. I almost fell over. Me? Gangly, ungainly, ugly me? He also told me that he thought a lot of boys were intimidated by my height and by the fact that I had some brains in my head. He was right. but I didn't find that out until a few years later when I discovered that there were some boys who actually appreciated those attributes. David grew six inches in that time, lost his fat, went to Harvard, and by the time we were in college became someone I appreciated.
Myth #5: Having a boyfriend will make you happy.
The ultimate myth. "I thought having a boyfriend would be the greatest, coolest thing on earth," says Sarah Ling, fifteen, of Teaneck, New Jersey. "Strangely, it didn't work out that way. We had a lot of problems. I started losing track of who I was, of what I needed, and I focused on him all the time. My schoolwork started to suffer. l'd always been a pretty happy-go-lucky person, and suddenly everyone was asking me what was wrong. I guess I looked grim. I was always thinking about the relationship, what I could do to make him happier so he would treat me better. It was stupid. I should have just stopped seeing him. But I was very tied into it.
I thought I needed him in order to have a social life. I thought I wouldn't meet anybody else. I got pretty depressed and started doing things like slamming the door to my bedroom whenever things got ten se at home. It wasn't good. I was sad when summer came and he went off to work on his uncles ranch in Wyoming, but as soon as he left I started to feel much better. And by the time he'd be en gone a month l'd started dating a few other guys, and frankly, I couldn't believe that I'd spent so much time with a person who made my life so difficult. There are lots of fun guys out there, and I figure I might as well date as many of them as I want to while I have the chance. I've got plenty of time to be settled down later, when I'm older. I can't think of a single good reason to do it now."
I understand how Sarah feels. I've had a boyfriend of one sort or another al most constantly since college. I even dated my childhood flame, the illustrious Billy Solomon. He demonstrated an ongoing passion for kissing my neck, although I refrained from pulling his hair because he didn't have much left. Then a long and serious relationship ended and I regained a sense of what it was like to focus completely on myself:
There I was, without a boyfriend. Inevitably-mere hours, it seemed, after the breakup--the questions came: "Have you met anybody yet?" "Why not, a beautiful girl like you?" (This last, from my mother.) The offers of blind dates came in, but I turned them down. I have to admit that I relished that time alone. I made dates with my friends without checking anybody else's calendar. I decided which movie I wanted to see and what to eat afterward. I didn't have to wonder whether some guy was going to call or why he hadn't. I knew this state wouldn't last forever. And it didn't. And knowing that I have a boyfriend because I want one and because I'm ready-and not because I have to have one-is the biggest myth shatterer of all.'
Source: Seventeen Magazine
|
  Relations Beauty Health Recipes |
