From Paper Hearts to Tender Human Hearts

Preparing girls for love

Valentine's Day, commercial as it may be, is important to kids. It starts with giving paper hearts in preschool and morphs into offering a tender human heart in adolescence and young adulthood, or painfully wishing someone else would offer theirs.

As our kids develop their first crushes, start to date, and fall in love, we watch with hope, excitement, and trepidation. Will they get hurt? Will they choose someone good to them or pine for someone unkind or unavailable? How can we set them up to understand love when we don't understand it half the time?

The media has created a rich fantasy for girls that says a man’s love (after sufficient tests of her own love and patience) will transform her from invisible peasant into princess beloved by all the kingdom—and her relationship will magically look very different from her parents’. Cultural ideals of who men and women should be in relationships powerfully shape heterosexual romantic partner preferences, promoting the gender status quo and upholding traditional gender roles. In a phenomenon researchers have dubbed the glass slipper effect, the more a woman associates male romantic partners with chivalry, the less interest she shows in education, career goals, and earning money.

It’s not that parents haven’t tried to counteract the fantasy of being saved by a man in the last couple of generations. The soundtrack to my childhood was the iconic 1970s album Free to Be . . . You and Me about gender equality. On it was the story of Atalanta, the princess heroine who outran her suitors so she, rather than her father, the king, could choose whether and whom she’d marry someday. The story empowered little girls everywhere with the message they have the right to choose their futures. But that’s where it ends. We didn’t know once we chose— if that choice included marriage and kids— there’d be the double shift, the mental load, no paid maternity leave, expensive childcare, the need to trade pay for flexibility, the judgment we’d face for “leaning in” or “opt-ing out.” So our children have watched us get divorced in droves, or stay in relationships to “make it work for the kids” or to save face.

Today, we stress girls’ independence and warn them against expecting anyone else to make them happy, encourage them to find fulfillment before entering a serious relationship, and tell them not to rely on a man for financial stability because “you never know.” However, our expectation that they find happiness by following a script that ultimately has them supporting men’s happiness with their bodies, their children, and their unpaid labor in exchange for economic support and social recognition hasn’t changed much. Sure, there’s been improvement. Now men cook and do bath time and, as long as women gush sufficiently, they’re allowed to supplement their own dreams (just don’t push it, girl).

Instead of helping them question romantic social norms and work through these fantasies, we’ve confused them; we’ve created cynicism and fear, and we might have inadvertently diminished the significance of relationships. We can no longer afford to let pop culture educate our children on relationships or to empower choice without also explaining the limitations.¹

Shatter the Glass Slipper, Endorse Love

Romance and inequality are deeply entwined so how can we shatter the glass slipper without belittling the fun of romance and the importance of deeply loving relationships?

We don’t want to diminish the butterflies and fireworks. In fact, we should encourage them to savor these things while also telling them that when the euphoria inevitably wears off is when love is tested. Enduring love is grounded, tangible, and stable. We can describe how being in a long-term, committed relationship—one that offers meaningful shared experiences, steady support, and opportunities to be supportive— is good for her well-being even after, or maybe especially after, the stomach churning stops. Perhaps most important, though, we need to drive home the message that nurturing those qualities is a choice. And it’s a choice that’s easier to make in the beginning of a relationship when their crush is little more than a projection of what could be. It’s also imperative that girls hear many times over that BOTH parties must make the choice or it will be a very unsatisfying life. That’s a very different message from the fairytale premise that we love instinctually.

You might say something like: “In the beginning, hormones are in the driver’s seat and you get to coast along, carefree with the wind in your hair. But as the relationship grows, both of you will have to take the wheel if you don’t want to crash.” It’s far more difficult to continue in a relationship when it encompasses compromises, sacrifices, foibles and farts, expressing gratitude, listening empathically, forgiving. Those are skills that strengthen and sustain long-term social bonds, and we need to help kids understand this rather than hope maturity will make it clear eventually.

Many of my adult female patients have told me they walked away from solid, healthy relationships with partners they loved because their experience didn't match the cultural ideology. Or conversely, they stayed too long because they thought love meant you should never give up on it, even if it means you are shamed and demeaned.

Too often my teen and young adult patients are unprepared for the focused, tender, subtle, generous work of learning how to love and be loved and developing a mature romantic relationship. The good news is, kids tell us they want our help. A project out of Harvard whose mission is to help caregivers and educators raise caring, ethical human beings found 70% of high school and college students reported wishing they’d received more information from their parents about romantic relationships. They wanted help with starting relationships, dealing with breakups, avoiding being hurt, and how to have a more mature relationship. Kids want to know more about how to love and be loved.

Love is a verb

Perhaps the best way to explain love to our daughters—to all our children—is to invoke the renown author bell hooks’ words, “Love is a verb.” hooks argues that “our confusion about what we mean when we use the word 'love' is the source of our difficulty in loving.”

We do our children no favors by having them enter adolescence believing romantic love is an indefinable and mystical thing. They don’t know what to look for or how to know whether their intense feelings for someone else are likely to lead to healthy or unhealthy romantic relationships. When we help them understand that love is an action (which sometimes means inaction, restraint, and self-control); that love must be demonstrated and used to guide how people interact with each other—not just something someone says they feel—they will be better able to assess their romantic relationships, rather than be swept away by big feelings.

We can tell our kids that grand gestures are lovely, but that it’s their sweetheart's day-to-day actions that will tell them how he really feels. We can insist a guy won’t magically bring their life into focus and make it matter, but we must also tell them there are actual ways they can and should expect to be fulfilled in their primary relationships. One girl said to me, “I’m pretty amazed he thinks my yearbook work is as important as I do. Sometimes he’ll spend hours with me at the office on a Saturday and never make me feel guilty.” That’s what we should tell our daughters to expect (and to provide). Without learning what they can expect, practically speaking, they risk spending years in a relationship that doesn’t provide that, blaming themselves for not figuring out how to be fulfilled on their own. They should also hear from us that relationships take work in the way a hobby you’re excited about takes work, which might be frustrating at times but isn’t painful, exhausting work; and that conflict is normal, though intentionally inflicting pain is not.

Tell her to pay attention to who she is with her paramour, not who he is on paper. Ask them if he’s paying attention to what matters. Tell them what matters to you—when he gets my humor, when she memorizes how much milk I take in my coffee, when they put their phone aside to listen to what’s upsetting me, when it's clear my personal growth is important to him. Then explore what matters to them.

Although it may seem obvious, kids need to be reminded often that a marker of a healthy relationship is when they feel more hopeful, caring, generous and self-respecting, not chronically desperate and self-doubting.

The allure of the unavailable man

Over and over (and over), I see girls in therapy who are frustrated because they sense a boy has feelings for them but is afraid of getting close or won't commit. Of course, people of all genders, not just boys/men, can have intimacy issues. But in straight relationships this is the dynamic I see most often.

As a culture we've created a massive power differential in heterosexual couples by making relationships disproportionately important for girls, and making any whiff of their own dependency humiliating for boys. Girls' ability to empathize with boys' fears, combined with their social conditioning to take responsibility for relationships, can make it harder for them to get angry and walk away. Instead, they’re spurred to want to prove their love in order to help him feel safer. Then they can finally have the love story they’ve been promised.

Girls don’t always appreciate that for a relationship to thrive, it must be a mutual project consciously tended to by both partners. “You should never have to grovel for love,” I’ve told my daughter more than once. “The person you choose should choose you back.” Love is a verb comes in handy here. We can tell them that it doesn’t matter if someone feels love, if he can’t show it most of the time. Tell them it doesn’t matter, even if they understand his trauma. The concept behind these words is you can’t love a man into examining his pain, no matter how beautiful, smart, or caring you are, because you can’t compete with the social rewards he otherwise reaps from stoicism and an unequal stratification of power.

You might be thinking that no matter how well we educate our children to assess a love interest, love cares little for our left-brain logic. As the novelist- philosopher Alain de Botton writes in his book On Love, “There is a great difference . . . between wisdom and the wise life.” While love may indeed oppose reason, and attraction can’t easily be suspended, I believe the seeds we’ve planted will sprout before our daughters establish dysfunctional patterns that are difficult to break.

1. Much more in Sexism & Sensibility on how to explain the limitations in order to prepare girls without scaring them. We want to introduce not too much too soon, but also not too little too late!

---

NOTE: This piece is adapted from my book Sexism & Sensibility: Raising Empowered, Resilient Girls in The Modern World.

---