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Adolescent Love as a Reflection of Teen-Agers' Search for Identity

1964; Wiley; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/349738

1741-3737

Evelyn Millis Duvall,

Family Dynamics and Relationships

Some adults take adolescent love affairs lightly, regarding them as temporary and inconsequential. Others express their amusement at the callow quality of teen-agers' affection, as Booth Tarkington did so well in Seventeen. Some parents and teachers view adolescent love with dismay and fear its consequences in premarital sexual precocity or impulsive premature marriage. Still other adults may agree that puppy love often leads to a dog's life, but they feel that teen-agers have a right to make their own mistakes in affairs of the heart, for these affairs, after all, cannot be controlled. Recognizing these different attitudes toward early love relationships, we can still realize that adolescent love may reflect the life situation of a given teen-ager in ways which make it possible to understand and deal with it in perspective. Granted that America's romantic culture sells love on every hand, there must be some reason why some high school students fall in love so early, while others remain fairly cool-headed until they have finished their schooling and are ready to settle down in marriage. Reviewing relevant research leads to three hypotheses. 1. Teen-agers who feel that they are in love tend to be actively repudiating their parents in one or more ways. This is suggested by Nye's findings' that some adolescents reject their parents more than do others and that teen-agers' behavior is more closely related to the attitude of the child toward the parent than of the parent toward the child.2 Feeling estranged from his parents, the adolescent may attach himself affectionally to a member of the opposite sex, both to satisfy his emotional hunger and to show his parents that they are not so emotionally important anymore. Conversely, the high school student who has a fairly good relationship with his parents may be expected to be less involved emotionally in adolescent love affairs.