What I Tell My Teenage Daughter About Love
It can be confusing sometimes.
My 14-year-old daughter has lots of questions about love these days. Not about the birds and the bees though, since we’ve covered all that. The information that she wants to know now is slightly more complicated.
She often says she wishes she had somebody to love. It’s no longer good enough for her to just love me or her dad or our dog, Stella. She wants the real thing. She’s afraid any potential dates would think she was weird and that she’ll never find anybody to fall in love with her. There’s nothing wrong with my beautiful girl who I bet will have her choice of suitors as she gets older. However, she doesn’t want to wait. She wants to be in love right now!
I’ve given her some well-placed advice that I’ve learned over the years, some of it the hard way. I’m currently on my third marriage. Maybe that doesn’t make me an expert. Maybe it’s actually quite the opposite. I’ve made plenty of mistakes since the age of 15 when I started dating.
The fact that I’ve been married three times makes for a lot of embarrassing jokes in my family. I’ve been divorced twice, and both times I believe it was the absolute right thing to do. Still, I sometimes wonder whether I’m the wrong person to dole out advice on relationships.
