Dr. Rebecca Jankovich
(2009-09-01)
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Lately I've been working with college age girls who find themselves overly consumed by their love lives. Picture the lovely 19 year old who has her entire life ahead of her, but all she can think about is whether her boyfriend is in love with her, whether she's important that he chooses to hang with her instead of his friends, whether he's faithful. Picture the honor student girl who's calling or texting her boyfriend 20 times a day and throughout the night just to know he's where he says he is. The girls' parents can't understand how their smart daughter has lost her good sense.
I don't think the explanation for this bad judgment in relationships is as simple as writing it off to the girl has poor self-esteem. These young women I'm working with don't have poor self-esteem. I've seen a variety of reasons these promising college girls grab onto to these hopeless ties with boys and then obsess and fret over the relationship. One reason is the girl hasn't learned that relationships can be frought with trouble if you don't match well. The girl's parents are typically well matched and happy in their marriage. She's grown up in a family where the parents like each other and treat each other with respect. Her mind set is that of course, this is how relationships work: people love each other, do what they say they're going to do, treat each other with dignity and honesty. She can't imagine that the boy she's so crazy about wouldn't be as honorable as her Dad.
And sometimes, the girl is not only more ready for a committed relationship than most college-aged boys seem to be, but she also wants a merged relationship. People fall into a continuum of how close, how intertwined they want to be when they're intimate; the continuum ranges from merged, where the couple are best friends and spend all their time together, to inter-dependent where the couple is close but allows for separate time as well, to parallel where the couple spends very little time together but still feel connected and define themselves as a couple. We tend to be most comfortable with the model of how close to be that we watched our parents live; if they were merged, then we're most at ease in a merged relationship ourselves.
Given that men's personalities tend to be organized around the theme of independence, it makes sense that fewer boys like being merged than do girls. There are some boys who prefer this model but not nearly as many as there are girls. A boy might go along with the girl's preference for merging, spending all their time together when not in class or at work, staying in constant contact by phone and texting, but he'll only go along for awhile, when he's dazzled by infatuation and the saturation of his sexual needs. As he moves out of infatuation and becomes more of his real, not dazzled self, he's likely to pull away from the merged style and start resisting the girl's pressure to stay in such constant contact. Here's where the girl starts to obsess and fret; thinking more about her boyfriend than about her studies or her own developing self.
Here's where she starts having crying fits, hours of despair, and her parents start worrying she's lost her mind.
The need to merge also covers the girl's fears of growing up, letting go of the safe haven of her family, having to take care of herself, searching for a life mate with whom to carve a life. The book series Twilight is hugely popular with young girls partly because it romanticizes the relationship of a girl with her beloved who not only wants to merge with her in every possible way, but who has supernatural powers to watch over and take care of her. But this remains a fantasy, not reality.
The college girl who's trying to merge with her boyfriend and gets too caught up in pressuring him to be the way she wants him to be, hasn't lost her mind, but she has lost her ability to soothe herself and realize she can survive without this boy. As parents you'll try get through to your daughter to help her see she's trying to merge with either an unsuitable match or with a boy who doesn't want to merge; she won't want to hear your wise counsel because she can't bear the news. Here's where you find her an older, experienced and savvy woman, a family friend or a therapist, to help her understand she's pursuing a hopeless path, one that will drive away the boys with whom she falls in love. Now is when she learns to tolerate her fears of being alone when the boy doesn't meet her needs for merging. Now is when she learns the path to happiness lies within the self, not in the arms of another.
© Copyright 2009, KUNR
