Earlier this month, I had the honor of interviewing Lisa Phillips, the author of Unrequited: The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Romantic Obsession and Public Radio: Behind The Voices. She’s written about relationships, mental health and teens for the New York Times, Washington Post, Psych today, Cosmopolitan, and many other outlets. She currently teaches journalism and the popular love and heartbreak seminar at the State University of New York at New Paltz. In her new book, First Love: Guiding Teens through Relationships and Heartbreak, chronicles the challenges today’s adolescents face as they navigate crushes, dating and breakups, and also the challenges that adults face as they strive to provide guidance and support. It’s told from the perspective of a professor, a mother, and an award winning journalist. This is a condensed version of our interview, which will soon be on our youtube page. The second half of this interview will be posted in another blog in the coming weeks.

In one of the earlier chapters, you talk about your own experience as a mother. When your daughter first kind of crushed on somebody, she used the language, “I’m so gone”. You described your feelings as a parent, as a mother, as also feeling like your daughter was so gone from you as an attachment figure. What should be concerning when teens are so “gone” from their own core sense of self in relationships? 

It’s developmentally appropriate, they’re supposed to be having these feelings. They’re developing sexually and emotionally and they essentially are supposed to be on a journey of finding new attachment figures to replace us with. Not as their new mother or father, obviously, but as their peer, main attachment figure. This is what we do as human beings. It is how the species perpetuates itself. It is how we all have the promise of living healthy relationship lives. This is part of what keeps us healthy. Parents may think: This can’t be healthy, because everything is about the other person and the enmeshment of the relationship, and that, of course, can be cause for concern. If you can, engage your child about this. Sometimes even they feel like less of themselves and that can be a very hard thing to interfere with. But, it is absolutely something that, if you have some language for it, can be a real awakening for a young person. Ask: Do you feel like more of yourself? Do you feel like less of yourself? They might not necessarily say, Hey, Mom, you just made me see the truth of this situation. This dude is gone. It may not happen that way, but you know how young people are. They hear you, even if they don’t always let on that they hear you. So this is one of the ways that parents can offer ideas and language to help them assess how gone they are and if it’s healthy. If it’s not ask your child what might they want to be thinking about to change that?

What would you say to parents about how to prepare themselves? Not talking about having conversations around sex, but how to prepare kids for understanding what will happen to them when they initially fall in love?

Young people will be exposed to representations of romance, desire, and love from a very early age. I mean, this is in Disney movies, right? So you can actually start those discussions really early. And I definitely did with my daughter. We had an ongoing joke about Snow White and the foolish things she did. Why is she opening the door for strangers? Just overall, whenever we saw a representation of love on screen, we would engage about it. What I talk to my students about a lot is that this is a force that can be very disorienting and very intense, and it can lead to wonderful things. As Helen Fisher says, it’s a great addiction when it’s going well and a horrible addiction when it’s going badly, but it ties us to something that is so fundamental to being human. If we didn’t have these feelings, we would not open the door to lasting, loving, romantic relationships. It can be very redeeming for young people to hear that it’s not just because I can’t control myself that I feel this way. It is a part of the life force of being a human being.

What did you find when interviewing parents about what emotions got raised as they witnessed their kids emerging romantic lives?

A friend of mine read an early version of this book and her comment was, “we’re all still recovering from being teens”.  Parents get very stirred up by watching their kids enter the teen years, because it brings up a lot. It’s like they get to have all the firsts again. They hopefully get to do it better than we did, right? It stirs up regret, longing for different lives, nostalgia, all kinds of things I think we all go through. Fathers tend to get depressed watching their sons date, but they also have a rise in self esteem. That was like a wacky finding from that study, and it’s almost like what their sons are doing out in the word world sexually, is some reflection on the fathers, where the mothers tend to have these feelings of, you know, regret and longing, should I change my life and things like that. 

I think that what I have heard from parents is a lot of “I don’t want my child to turn out like I did, or to go through what I did”. If they had experienced sexual assault, dating abuse, domestic abuse, or anything traumatic, they felt very concerned about what could happen to their child. Sometimes that really opens them up in a really beautiful and inspiring way, then sometimes it shuts them down where there are things they literally couldn’t see because they were still in their own stuff. One of the big messages in my book is for parents to take that time to really tune into what they’re going through and not impose it on their child. Their child, at this juncture, really needs to be seen and heard for what they are going through at the moment. 

Children are often very curious about their parents’ past romantic lives. It’s not like you can never bring that up. They’re really powerful, lasting cautionary tales that teens will quote to me. The timing of this disclosure is really important. If your child is in strife about a breakup, for example, this is not the time to go into your worst breakup when you were 15. Timing is everything. So it’s just really about when you bring these things into the conversation that’s really important. Also, to just know you’re going to need care for yourself if it really stirs up a lot. You want to try to find that balance between acknowledging some of the reasons for the ways you react and the policies you set and giving your children their own reality in this journey. It opens up a space for parents to start to connect on a deeper level about what they were going through intergenerationally, and not just like one person’s past and one person’s present.

How do we prepare kids to think about what they are interested in having in a sexual encounter?

One of the things that parents get really concerned about is relationship policy, like, what do I do? I think there are some interesting conundrums that come up because we have to figure out what kind of space is okay in our homes for our children to explore their sexuality? At what age is the closed bedroom door okay? At what age is the sleepover okay, if it’s ever going to be okay? I think when I got to those questions in my own life, I was really fascinated by things that I felt okay about and things I didn’t. A young woman I interviewed for the book told me that she would ask her parents to go out to dinner when she’s just having a date. She’d basically say, like, Mom and Dad, could you please go out to dinner? I’m going to have this person over. She said they knew that this was basically: will you give me privacy to have sex? And I thought to myself, “Oh my God, this is so great, but I can’t do that”. I just can’t do it! I can’t be that open. I felt really confused about that, and I struggled to express it in our family policy. And then I finally kind of figured out a language, which is that I really wanted my daughter to be aware of pleasure and equality. We have talked about it in a limited way, and she often was like, “No, Mom, no, I know about that, conversation over”, but at least we got it out there, right? So we both know it matters to us. 

But then we need to be open about giving kids space to truly explore, which, especially for girls in heterosexual relationships, means talking about the fact that the boy orgasm is automatic while the girl orgasm is an art form. And our art takes time. It takes privacy, it takes being relaxed. I sort of struggled with feeling a little bit like a hypocrite for this, until I finally said, You know what, I want you to know that I really value the privacy around this. I think I figured out a kind of unspoken way to talk about it that wasn’t quite as explicit. My husband and I just started to leave more open spaces and made sure she knew they were open spaces.

First Love: Guiding Teens through Relationships and Heartbreak, is available to the public on February 4th, just in time for Valentine’s Day!