Against Dating in High School

I enjoyed reading Doctor Spock's Baby and Child Care when I was a child. My life was full of children, both at school and at home, and being a child myself, I was naturally interested in knowing all about how I should be raised.  I dipped into it again and again over the years.

Doctor Spock disapproved of dating at a young age. He thought teenagers should not date until they were in their later teens, lest they grow jaded and bored of the business. However, my mother didn't think it was fair not to let me date until I was in my later teens because she herself had gone to a formal dance with an upperclassman when she was fourteen. That was circa 1960.  

In 1960, the median age for first marriage for men and women was the early twenties. This means that half of Canadians and Americans were married by the age of 24. (The median age for girls in the USA was 20.) Many Americans and Canadians got married fresh out of high school, as soon as they had jobs. My mother married at 23. Therefore, dating in high school made sense.  

In 2011, the median age for first marriage for American men was 28.7 and for American women was 26.5. This means that half of American men do not marry until at least around 29 and half of American women do not marry until at least around 27. Very few Americans or Canadians marry fresh out of high school. And therefore high school dating (aka "re-lay-tionships") no longer makes sense.   

When I was in high school, I discovered that some girls were not allowed to date/hang around with boys at night at all. At the time, I thought this was because their parents were super-strict and stuck in Old World ways. However, I now think that this had something to do with the fact that there was no such thing as dating in rural and small town Italy when my friends parents' were growing up. There was courtship of girls with strong parents, and there was sexual exploitation of girls with weak parents. End of post-war Italian story.

Dating as my mother knew it in the 1960s, with its iron clad rules about how nice girls were to be treated, existed mostly in the middle-class English-speaking world. In other kinds of countries, people watched their daughters like hawks and only tentatively eased their grip over their lives when prospective good husbands began hanging around. They were, of course, terrified that their daughters might be used and thrown aside like tissues which, among other things, would hamper their chances of attracting a good husband.

My friends' Old World parents might have thought my parents were negligent; as a matter of fact, I think my parents thought Canadian boys were still like Canadian boys in 1960: dividing girls into "easy" and "precious" and assuming that Girls Like Me were in the "precious" category.  (So not true, by the way, in a city so multicultural that there were multiple racist terms for goras ghosts mangia-cakes white Canadians from English-speaking homes, often assumed to be sluts or potential sluts/bad wives just for not belonging to the right ethnic group.)

Unfortunately, being found attractive by boys or men--especially the "right kind" of boys or men--has always been a status symbol among girls and women and, for some reason, it still is. Personally, I understand why this would be once you have left high school and are either in work or at university. As   a woman can reasonably expect to marry when she is about 27, it makes sense that she might start to care about how men (as men) perceive her and how to attract them when she is 21 or so. 

However, it makes no sense whatsoever for girls of seven or seventeen to give a damn. If everyone in your village gets married at 21, okay, start worrying at seventeen. But if most people don't marry until they are at least 27, then what is the problem?  Dating is for deciding upon a marriage partner, and if you are probably not going to marry until you are at least 27, it is rather silly to wish for a boyfriend at seventeen, let alone turn yourself into a moral pretzel to get one. 

I have just erased a passage in which I describe contemporary teenage boys as toads and fiends from hell. That seemed too harsh and genuinely unfair to the boys who want and strive to be good men, so instead I will suggest that no girl under the age of 21 has any business seeing boys as anyone more than platonic friends or potential friends. Not only is it perfectly normal to be "twenty-one and never had a boyfriend," it is an enviable state. Grandmothers and mothers who yak on and on about all the boyfriends they had when they were sixteen did not live in the ghastly sexual climate of today. 

Elementary school and high school are not for romance. They are for learning, developing and becoming whole people in a stimulating but safe environment.  Life before nineteen could be a blissful stretch of play, athletics, mastery of such arts as music and painting, language acquisition and opportunities most forty-year olds would love to have. What a shame to waste such a wonderful period of life on worrying about what boys think or, worse, sacrificing one's dignity and sense of self-worth to attract them sexually.