“We lived together for almost two years and I was really in love with her. Maybe I loved her too much, because I started paying more of her expenses and even signed for some of her debt. I’d never been in love before, and I just figured this was it. Someday we’d get married and live happily ever after—that was how I felt. But she was more experienced in relationships than me. I don’t think she was trying to use me. She just got tired of me as the magic wore off, at least for her. Then she wanted more of a separate social life, and pretty soon that included guys. Finally, one day she left, and it took everything out of me. I didn’t want to live in that place anymore. I could barely make it to my job. I just needed a break. So I came home.”
I don’t know how many young people actually fall in love in high school, but on the basis of my counseling experience with adolescents, I would guess that it’s a small minority. The chemistry of falling into romantic love—attraction, infatuation, loving companionship, and emotional intimacy that increases one’s capacity for attachment—happens to relatively few high school teens.
Come trial independence, however, the susceptibility of older adolescents to falling in love increases, because they are away from home, feel more socially alone, are more mature, and have grown more open to the possibility of romantic companionship to help anchor themselves when they are out on their own. Feeling less connected to family and old friends can create more openness to loving companionship.
However, the eventual breakup of a relationship can be devastating, particularly when it is the first love. In that case, a young person may suddenly want to return to the sanctuary of home to put the shattered pieces of his or her life back together.
When failed love breaks the heart of young people shortly after they have stepped out on their own, they face three big challenges in recovering:
In this painful process, with understanding and guidance, parents can be of help, either after their child boomerangs home or before, to help them recover.
In a breakup, just as in a divorce, unless the separation is mutually desired (with both partners sharing the hardship of the decision), there will be two roles to play, one more painful than the other. One role to play is initiator, the partner who has thought it over, felt it through, and decided to end the relationship. The other role to play is the reactor, the partner who expects or wants the relationship to continue and may be surprised and hurt by the decision to end it.
Each role brings with it emotional burdens. The initiator bears the responsibility for terminating the relationship and the guilt for causing the reactor to suffer. The reactor must bear the rejection of being cast aside.
In most cases, when a breakup causes a young person to return home, that son or daughter is usually the reactor. Thus, parents’ concern should be helping manage rejection and hurt. The key question for parents to ask is this: “Is our child taking the rejection personally?” It’s one thing to feel emotionally wounded by the loss, but it is another to blame the broken relationship on a personal failing or inadequacy and then reject oneself. This creates a double dose of pain, and self-esteem can plummet.
As one young man despaired to his parents, “What’s wrong with me when the person I love can suddenly stop loving me?”
“What can we tell our son?” they asked. “We just hate to see him beat up on himself on top of being broken-hearted. It’s like punishing himself for getting hurt!”
There are a number of valuable distinctions that parents can suggest to moderate the pain their child is feeling:
By talking them through these understandings, parents can help their bereaved sons or daughters to not give rejection a lasting, wounding power. And then they will be that much closer to opening up to a loving relationship again should the opportunity arise.
Just as job loss creates a multitude of psychological losses to deal with (see Chapter 6), broken love relationships create multiple losses, too. Each of these losses is marked by questions that need answering if the young person (the one rejected and returning home) can come to terms with emotional acceptance of the breakup and be able to move on. The following sections discuss a variety of common losses that a breakup can create.
Breakup always creates the need for information in the rejected party. The question is: “Why did the other person want to end the relationship with me?” Often, the young person has no good explanation for the breakup because the initiator chose not to tell.
I once worked with a young man in counseling who was truly bewildered:
“I didn’t even know anything was wrong. I literally got a ‘Dear John’ letter. That was all. She wrote, ‘After much thought, I believe we should stop seeing each other. Of course I wish you the best. Katherine.’ No more ‘Kate.’ Two years and that’s how it ends? What am I supposed to think? She wouldn’t even answer my emails or return my calls. My parents suggested I send a letter and say that I will respect her wishes but would like to ask, ‘for the sake of the love we shared, to give me some explanation for your change of heart, because that would really help me let go and move on.’”
I told the young man that I thought his parents had a good idea and that I supported what they had suggested. Better to be painfully enlightened than be left to his own dark imaginings, wondering what he had done wrong. And she did write back, confessing that an old boyfriend had come back into the picture, and it was with that person that she wanted to spend her time. When it comes to breakups, a painful explanation is usually better than none at all, even if what one did or didn’t do contributed to the loss.
Breakup not only severs an attachment now, but it also ends expectations for the relationship later on. The question is, “What will I do with my life now?” The couple had plans they had talked about, all that they would do and share together. They had set an agenda for the future. When that agenda is gone, the young person may look at the emptiness ahead and wonder about what happens next.
Understanding that your son or daughter is at a transition point, not knowing how to navigate through it, and you can provide a framework for them to be able to conceive of a helpful transition. Your job is not to argue against the painful part of loss but to point out the gainful part. And that gainful part is this: the other side of loss is freedom.
How can this be? Because with the condition and circumstance of the old relationship no longer standing, two new freedoms have been created— freedom from old demands and restraints and freedom for new choices and opportunities.
This is the focus parents need to encourage their child. And they can do so by asking two questions. The freedom from old demands and restraints question is: “What old conditions and constraints are you now free to do without?” For freedom for new choices and opportunities, the question is: “What interests, possibilities, relationships, and opportunities are you now free to explore?”
So, for example, parents might suggest: “Now you are free from keeping your ex informed about your comings and goings as well as the necessity for joint decision making. And now you are free to do whatever you’d like and to see whomever you would like whenever you like.” Pointing out these new freedoms will help young people begin to envision a positive future ahead.
Parents can also mention that many first love relationships break up because for the initiating party, commitment creates a loss of personal freedom, and breaking up restores that freedom. So the breakup was motivated less by not liking things about the other person than simply by the desire to be “free” again. He or she was simply not ready to settle down.
Breakup causes the rejected party to feel solitary. The question here is, “Since we’re no longer together, who will I be with now?”
Being in love can actually be socially isolating. Often young people make the relationship a focus of social attention, to the exclusion of everyone else. One young woman explained:
“With someone right there, I got lazy about seeing other people. Plus being a couple for so long became who I was. ‘We’ did everything together, and when people thought of me, they thought of ‘us.’ We were just part of each other, and it’s only now without him that I realize how much of my social life I’ve given up. Friends just got tired of calling, and a few of them got hurt when I acted like I didn’t want to spend as much time with them as they (and I) were used to. So now I’m single again and totally out of the social swim. It feels like starting over. I feel so alone!”
And what she didn’t say was that it felt awkward, even scary.
In this situation, as a parent you can acknowledge the challenge of getting back into the social circle. You can empathize with this being hard to do when, in addition to feeling out of practice, the young person’s confidence is lowered from the aftereffects of rejection. Then you can encourage your child to join some organized interest or activity groups, to attend gatherings to revive his or her socializing skills, to call up old friends and acquaintances who have fallen away, and even to initiate and accept casual dating. And of course, there is always social networking on the Internet. Having taken oneself out of social circulation for the sake of the old relationship, now the task is to get oneself back in.
Breakup often causes the rejected party to criticize him- or herself. The question here is, “What is wrong with me?”
As mentioned earlier, it is hard for a person to be rejected without, to some degree, worsening the painful experience by faulting oneself. Assessing and assigning one’s share of responsibility for the loss of relationship is one thing, but running oneself down is another. Beating up on oneself in the wake of a breakup, when one is already going through a bad time, is a bad idea. In fact, one needs to boost one’s own sense of worth.
So in this case, you can encourage young people to ask and answer the counterquestion: “What is right with me?” By affirming themselves with positive thoughts, setting positive expectations for themselves, and engaging in self-enhancing activities, they can restore their sense of personal adequacy. And if the young person is so sad that she is unable to identify positive and attractive aspects of herself, parents can offer to itemize those positives themselves.
Parents will know that recovery is under way when they start to hear statements of letting go, such as the following:
But parents will know that their child is still holding on from such statements as these:
If after several months at home the young person is still sounding stuck, it is usually advisable to find him or her some counseling to help move through what is still a very painful loss. Counseling can help with letting go.
One of the toughest jobs for parents is hanging in there with their son or daughter when a breakup keeps mending and then breaking off again. The young person vacillates between letting go and holding on, enduring loss and embracing hope, giving up and wanting to give it another try, cutting off and then getting back in contact. Why? Even for the party doing the jilting, the relationship was not an entirely unhappy experience. In fact, because the couple shared many good times as well, it is easy to shift from focusing on what didn’t work in the relationship to what did, and this shift creates the on-again and off-again tug-of-war that parents can find so frustrating to watch. “Why can’t she just make up her mind?”
Help your child understand that breaking up in most cases is not the outcome of a single decision. It is often a process of extended internal debate over the pros and cons of maintaining or ending a very powerful relationship in which the possibility of lasting love is at stake. In this process, young people can feel painfully torn whichever way they choose, so any “final” choices are going to be hard come by. Thus, parents have to be patient while this heartrending deliberation unfolds. One of the great benefits of moving back home after a breakup is that it can provide a young person with separation, distance, and perspective, all of which allow for a more reflective and objective point of view to prevail, free from the daily pressure of the relationship.
To the degree that they are invited to participate in this deliberation, parents can reflect back what the young person has told them about the relationship to bring back into focus what the specific salient events and experiences were like. A lot of times their reminder can help a young person stick to a decision. So they can say, “You told us that, love you as he said he did and says he does, he still strayed into other intimacies, so you might want to remember that.”
You can also help your son or daughter gain from the education the breakup had to teach about how to assess the quality of a caring relationship.
When parents can provide some guidelines for evaluating the “goodness” of a lost relationship, they can help influence how their child selects a companion in his or her next relationship.
In what ways did the relationship work well and in what ways did it work badly? What kind of treatment has their child learned to expect in a relationship, and what unhealthy behavior does he or she not want? These questions help young people evaluate their relationships for lessons that can make the next relationship better. Parents need to be realistic about relationship education. It is not addressed in school. It is a product of life experience. So here, parents can be very helpful in sorting out the breakup experience.
For example, they can suggest four simple questions to which a son or daughter needs to answer yes, to affirm that the relationship was good, or at least good enough:
If a young person cannot answer yes to all four questions, then there is some work to do on developing a healthy relationship. For many young people, the path to learning how to have a good relationship runs through the hard experience of having one or more bad relationships. In the words of one veteran of an unhappy love experience, “I never want to fall for anyone like that again!” So the more young people are able to evaluate their relationships honestly, the better prepared they will be for the next relationship they enter.
If you find that your child is engaged in and does well with this idea of evaluating their relationships, there are more specific, advanced questions you can suggest that he or she think about as well, ones that are relevant for couples of any age:
Factoring in these advanced questions shows how it takes a lot of work to create a love relationship in which both parties can answer yes to all these questions.
One thing you never want is for your son or daughter to be treated meanly in a relationship. But if that should occur, it becomes worse if your child does not speak up about it, accepts or makes excuses for it, or worst of all believes it is deserved.
If you hear expressions of the mistreatment mind-set, you need to pay heed. There are six beliefs that can support this mind-set:
If parents hear any statements like these, they should encourage their child to get psychological help so that the next relationship has a possibility of being a healthier one. Many young people do suffer through a bad relationship, in which they are treated badly or act badly themselves, before they learn enough to create a good relationship in which both parties are treated well. But this improvement can occur only if he or she learns constructive lessons along the way.
Another difficult situation occurs when a breakup is complicated by unintentional pregnancy. Then very serious responsibilities need to be fully discussed. In trial independence, there is a resurgence among adolescents in believing that one doesn’t have to play by the rules (like using protections when engaging in sex) and acting more unmindfully of consequences. The reality of pregnancy brings grown-up responsibility back into sudden focus. Getting a counselor to help sort through the complexity can be helpful.
Many parents worry about how or whether to help their child through a breakup, understanding that it is not their job to manage a son’s or daughter’s relationship. But although it isn’t parents’ job to manage, they can mentor young people by providing them with important questions to ask themselves. What you want is for your child to learn from the experience more about what it means and what it takes to have a good relationship, so that he or she is more likely and able to have a well-working committed partnership later on. Most important, you want your son or daughter to appreciate that, although the breakup hurts, it doesn’t nullify the good that was there. Just as the bad does not have to be repeated, what was good can carry over to build on in another relationship. And most important, you want your young person to understand that loving someone, or getting love from someone, is never a good substitute for loving oneself.
PARENTING PRESCRIPTION