DR. WALLACE: We have two children, a 17-year-old son and a 16-year-old daughter. Our daughter is interested in boys and has been for over two years. Our son shows no interest in girls. In his spare time, he only wants to work on his 1959 Chevrolet that we bought him for his birthday. I do everything possible to try to interest him in dating, but nothing has worked.
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The weird thing about this letter, and advice columnists reply, and the other letter and the comments in reply, is that none of them seem to be questioning the parents' premise that it's entirely the son's choice that he isn't dating and he need to be convinced of the benefits of dating (or, in these particular cases, of dating girls).
The thing is, you can't just start dating unilaterally. You need someone who is willing to date you, and they should probably be someone whom you're interested in dating yourself. But it doesn't seem to occur to anyone that one of the possibilities is that he might not have found someone in which there is mutual interest in dating.
I've seen this in real life to. I've had a number of people ask me why I'm not married (including a relative who thought an interrogation along these lines was the most suitable topic of conversation as we were sitting in the audience waiting for my younger sister's wedding ceremony which was about to start any second). When asked this, I always reply that it isn't something you can do unilaterally. You need at least one other consenting individual. The weird thing is this always - always always always, ever single time - seems to go in one ear and out the other. My interrogators often continue by trying to convince me of the benefits of marriage (which I am very well aware of and agree with them completely on) as though I need to be talked into it, completely disregarding the fact that you simply cannot get married unless you have someone to marry.
The other weird thing is I only ever get this interrogation in the singular. I'm walking around en couple but unmarried, no problems. Walking around alone, sometimes I get interrogated. It's never ever ever an implied "When are you guys going to get married?" When it happens, it's always without exception "When are you, personally, going to get married?"
4 comments:
I agree with you, but the parents don't say "our son is not dating," they say "our son shows no interest in girls". (Have they considered the possibility that he's interested in boys?) But leaving aside the presumed heterosexuality, I knew my nephews were interested in girls long before they dated, because they expressed interest, they wanted girlfriends, they told me about girls they thought were hot, etc. etc. I think the parents are asking about that, not about dating, which, as you say, can't happen unilaterally.
"The weird thing is this always - always always always, ever single time - seems to go in one ear and out the other."
Heh. If only that was weird. I find that people who say things like this never listen. Ever ever ever.
Hmm, I never even thought of it that way. I would never have talked to the grownups around me about romantic interests or who I thought was hot. That's just...private. It never occurred to me that anyone might share that with their grownups.
My only thought upon reading that was, HOLY CRAP!
That is all. For now.
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