The pursuit of pleasure

Lisa A. Phillips' 'First Love' is a sweet, heartfelt and caring look at the love, like and lust lives of young people, and how adults can support them

My first crush was a boy I’ll call D. He wore Vision Street Wear T-shirts and had jeans with ripped knees and he put gel in his hair and he was SO CUTE. I wrote his name in my diary and giggled with my best friend about him on the phone every day after school.

We were 9 years old.

It seems crazy to me now, the amount of space that D took up in my mind when I was still just a kid. But as journalist and professor Lisa A. Phillips writes in her new book, “First Love: Guiding Teens Through Relationships and Heartbreak,” feelings of desire and attraction can be huge, overwhelming, and all-consuming. "We want to make crushes small because we don't want to acknowledge how big they really are,” she writes.

I spoke with Lisa about her book, which is a love letter of sorts to romantic feelings and relationships.

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Tell me the story of your book: how it came to be, who it’s for and what you hope readers will take away from it.

I have been writing about relationships and mental health for the past 10 to 15 years, and I developed a course called “Love and Heartbreak,” so this is the water I swim in as a reporter, as a thinker, and as a human being. That said, when my daughter started her love life (which is a term I use very broadly to include emotions and romantic feelings, not just sex), it really freaked me out. I felt very protective, and I was also flashing back to my own experiences as a young adult, which was not the smoothest ride for me personally.

I knew that the quality of her relationships was going to be such a huge factor in the quality of her life as a person. I wanted to be a really good parent in guiding her or supporting her, but it’s tricky. We don’t necessarily know how to teach our kids to have relationships.

So I wrote this for parents like me, who are going through this, but it also felt important to write it in such a way that any caring adult — educators, mental health professionals, aunts and uncles — can also come into this. There’s some thing that young people are not going to go to their parents about. So I had this broader group in mind.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about representations of young love in media. Because I know right now for my 13-year-old, that’s kind of her main exposure to what love relationships look like.

First of all, I think a lot is changing in the Disney, big-screen world. When my daughter, who’s 20 now, was coming of age, it was still very much this Disney princess story. And there is still a lot of that out there. At a certain age, kids are still very drawn to those stories.

What I did during the princess phase was to have fun with it. I would joke with my daughter about how silly Snow White was, because she opened the door to a stranger. I still give a copy of “The Paper Bag Princess” to every mother of a young child, because I want them to have these counter-narratives.

My students are very cynical about these overly romanticized fables that they think they’ve been sold, and I think in a lot of ways, they’re right. But what these stories do get right is the way it feels. Those big feelings of love that you see played out on the screen — the obsessiveness, the butterflies — none of those things are myths. So I think you can interrogate the narrative and play with it, but also take the moment to talk about the ways that love is big.

One series I just love is “Heartstoppers.” It’s so good. They do all this fun stuff with the big emotions — sparks and hearts floating around — but it’s very real in talking about how complicated this stuff can be. I also love seeing how the parents are part of the narrative. You can see that they don’t always get it right, but they are trying to be there for their kid.

What are some mistakes or pitfalls for parents when their teen is going through a relationship or a breakup?

One of the biggest themes in my conversations with young people is what happens when parents lay down the law in a way that causes young people to go underground with what they’re doing. This is a really delicate thing, because I’m a strong proponent of parents assessing their values and setting relationship policy that reflects those values.

But if you outright forbid dating, or if you’ve made it clear that certain types of relationships aren’t acceptable to you in any way, young people are going to sneak around. They just are. They have devices, they have school, they have friends. They will find a way. What that means, as a parent, is that you’re choosing this rule over the risk of disconnecting from your kid.

If you’re lucky, everything will go OK. But if you’re not lucky, your kid could get into a situation with someone who’s manipulative, or abusive, or something else really unhealthy is going on, but they won’t be able to say anything to you about it because of your rule.

You can communicate values while still sending the message that, if you are in trouble or if you need support, I am here for you, no matter what. You can still set expectations and values while also saying, I value your safety and am here to support you through it.

When you talk to young people about relationships, what do you hear from them about what they want or need from the adults in their lives?

What they need most is validation of what they’re going through. And what they need most is communication from their parents that shows them that their parents value love as a subject of exploration, reflection, study and even moral growth. And I think that can start really early.

Even a child as young as 5 or 6 or 7 who comes to Mom or Dad and says, I have a crush on so-and-so, you have this amazing opportunity to communicate to them that you value these feelings. You can engage with your child about them, you can talk about what that feels like, and what they’re doing or not doing about it and how to make those decisions.

These are really great conversations in terms of tuning in, not just to the feelings, but to who the other person is and how they’re responding — or not responding. All of this conveys to your child that this is something we talk about in our family.

We need as parents not to fear the pain our children will go through.
These are all feelings that connect them to humanity.

And later on, we need as parents not to fear the pain our children will go through. We can validate that as something real, and see it not just as something they have to push past and get over, but something they can potentially learn from and grow from. These are all feelings that connect them to humanity. This is a core drive that people have. So talking about love and attraction and feelings and heartbreak in those ways can be really redemptive.

What about when our kids don’t want to talk to us about these feelings?

That can be one of the most frustrating things about teens. They are striving to individuate, and not talking to a parent about something becomes a form of power. But there are still ways to keep putting the touches on. Oh, isn’t that interesting, you have this really good friend, and I saw them with this other friend holding hands, it looks like there’s something going on, what do we think of this? Or you can watch things together — a TV show, a movie. Sometimes my daughter and I would watch something separately, not even watch it together, but then we would talk about it later, in the car.

All those things are just perpetual reminders that the door is open. You just have to keep opening the door. Even if you don’t feel a real sense of mutuality, just know that your child is still receiving the message that you value these conversations and that this stuff is important.

Tell me something wonderful about your kid:

My daughter is 20, and she’s actually a consent educator on her campus and she amazes me in this capacity. She teaches her peers about consent, and we talk about it a lot, and I learn from her. I’m constantly awakened by her perspective as someone who really values healthy sexuality and the process of consent. So that’s really wonderful.

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You can learn more about Lisa, who teaches journalism and ‘Love and Heartbreak’ at SUNY New Paltz, at lisaamyphillips.com.