Joanne Jacobs quoted an NYT article describing teenage relationships
As these teenagers see it, marriage and monogamy will seamlessly replace their youthful hookup careers sometime in their mid- to late 20’s — or, as one high-school boy from Rhode Island told me online, when ”we turn 30 and no one hot wants us anymore.”
Brian, a 16-year-old friend of Jesse’s, put it this way: ”Being in a real relationship just complicates everything. You feel obligated to be all, like, couply. And that gets really boring after a while. When you’re friends with benefits, you go over, hook up, then play video games or something. It rocks.”
I happen to disagree that “no one hot wants me anymore” now that I’m a thirtysomething. Who says husbands or wives can’t be hot? I think that the more years you have with each other, the better it gets…It’s not “really boring”. It increases in creativity and intensity and that is exciting…Married people can still be “friends with benefits”, by the way… it rocks.
When you are 16, 30 seems ancient. But it happens faster than you know. And then you see how much of life is left to live after 30.
Guess I’m a loser. Boring too. Hey, I’m happy this way. Reading this article, I don’t know if these kids can say the same thing. And then I feel sad.
1 response so far ↓
1 Steven Noels // Jun 7, 2004 at 2:52 am
Which recalls me of a conversation I once had with a fellow student of my photography class, which was in her very early twenties. I thought being young seems harder than when I was a teenager, since they seem pressed (by society and peers, I guess) to grow up faster than we did. She wasn’t aware of that, but still she felt there’s more individualism amongst youngsters – competitive with one another in a friendly way. Relationships come and go (as they did in our time), but the level of bonding was different, and when a relationship brakes up, they have to get their own head around it and carry on with their lives without much fuzz. Less emotional counseling or caring for each other.