260: Is My Son Too Obsessed With His Girlfriend?

about.

“Rina, I think a lot of people feel like they just don't know how to connect to their”

kid anymore.

I'm Rina 9 and welcome to ASLisa, the psychology of raising tweens and teens, and

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Just Google, Ask Lisa podcast, we're here to help you untangle family life. Episode 260 is my son to obsessed with his girlfriend. Love in the time of the teenage years, what's your take on all that, Lisa? Man, we're fresh off Valentine's Day, this is top of mind for a lot of people. You know, in general teens are not dating as much as they used to be.

I think it's one of those things where we can end up with a no matter what teens do, people give them a hard time, like if they're very, very, emotionally entangled with one another, we freak out if they don't date enough, we freak out, you know, but, you know, it's intense. I have cared for teenagers who are in some pretty intense relationships, and I don't think we should ever underestimate the power of these.

I was so glad to get this letter. Yeah, let's get right into it. I want to read this to you. Hello Dr. Lisa and Reina. My son is a sophomore in high school and has had a girlfriend for almost six months now.

The relationship has grown from hanging out occasionally, defending nearly every weekend together and communicating constantly over tech, snapchat, phone. She's a really sweet girl, and I can tell she makes him happy. But I'm worried that things might be a bit too serious for their age. I'm also concerned about how this might affect his friendships and his ability to continue

figuring out who he is at this stage. He used to spend time gaming online with his friends, but that doesn't happen anymore. Even when his friends are over, I notice he's often on his phone texting or snapping his girlfriend. But constant communication seems intense.

I know that his friends are getting together, and I don't hear mentioning anything about it. Makes me wonder if he's not being invited or if he's choosing not to go so he can spend time with his girlfriend instead. I want to keep the lines of communication open with him and be supportive.

But how do we get this to dial down a notch? He's a great student, earns great grades, and is active in sports. I just want to make sure he maintains a healthy balance. Thank you so much for your time, and for all the guidance you provide to parents like me.

“So Lisa, how common is it to have a relationship in the teenage years this intense?”

It's not that common. Like I would say, if you looked across, like we did a statistical study of how many teenagers have something that's this intense as this one is, I don't hear it that often, but I hear it, and it definitely happens. I mean, there's something that's different about today's relationships between teenagers

than the very intense relationships that we had as adolescents, if we did. And it's mentioned in the letter, which is the 24/7 aspect of it that kids who are dating, especially if they're their phones in their rooms, they wake up and they say good morning to each other, they text each other or call each other to say good morning. They say good night at the end of the day, and then they are in touch all day long.

They are in touch all day long, whether it's school, and if they have phones at school, with their phones at school, but then the second they get their phones again, they are back together. And I remember sort of watching this evolve in my time as a clinician where, you know, first I just started caring for teenagers who were in these really intense relationships

pre-phones. And I remember even then being like, man, like they are more intertwined with one another throughout the day than I am with my own husband.

Like it really is so amazing, who I like, I like the guy, but like we don't hang out nearly

as much as teenagers can when they're dating. And then tech came on the scene and then took that up several notches. So there are times in thinking about today's teenagers and caring for them that we can fall back on what we did as adolescents. That's a little bit true here, but it's less true because the intensity is just, it's profound

in terms of how much space they can take up in one another's lives. You know, the mom writes here, she's a little bit worried about his identity at this point. Are you concerned about him being overly defined by his relationship, being so attached to this girlfriend? I don't know what I think.

“I'm going to think about what do I think.”

What do you think? What do you think? If you think about your childhood or kids like this, yeah, what would your take be?

Again, young love, first love, that is an emotion I feel like 50 years later, right?

just a wonderful thing that I wish we could bottle up and sell quite frankly. But I, I just really, right, like the, like, rest time that for a minute, like, this is on steroids because everything for teenagers is around steroids and then first love and like, oh my gosh. So like, let's like have a moment of reverence, right, for like, this is part of life.

This first overwhelming all-consuming relationship and like, yeah, can a crash and burn in really ugly ways, 100%, but like, I like what you're saying just about like, this

is powerful and profound and kind of universal and timeless, the kind of, um, consuming

nature of this. Okay, so what would you do if you were the parent or what do you think? Or about the identity question, like what's your take on that? Well, first off, I will tell you, I think it is, I feel it in different social circles that I see of different kids at this age that, um, it's not so common.

I felt like when we were growing up having a boyfriend was a big thing and that was so important and if you didn't have one, you were really left out. It's not the case today, which I love, right, and you made a point of saying that. But one thing I do love is my kids have made such great French voices and they've got a great circle since they were very, very little.

And I think the fact that he might be left out of the boy group because he's got this relationship and the other guys don't, I worry about that.

“And also, I think these years are important.”

I've got friends in high school that I still stay in touch with and I love.

And I just wonder, you're making a lot of life choices in those years, the high school years, right? That kind of set the foundation. So should, should the parent be worried? Right.

I mean, it's, it's very well described, you know, the way he's kind of getting under this relationship island with this girl and leaving, you know, leaving his friendships, getting cut off from the friendships. Um, I can see the worry, right, that this is going to start to become what he's about and what he's all about.

Well, I only, I don't think it's like you can do to stop it. Right. And kind of think you complete. I don't think you can really. I mean, right?

“So, like, I think for the parents, you know, they might be like, we're watching a slow”

accident in motion, right? If she leaves him, he is really going to be in trouble because he's like, you know, kind of dumped his friends in some ways, or, and there is one place, I think where there is grounds for intervention, which is around when he's texting with her and front of his friends.

I actually do think that's the place where parent might be like, dude, you know, you can enjoy your relationship with your girlfriend, but like, don't be rude to your friends. Like, I think there is a place where I would actually, as a parent, make a comment. What's helpful in this letter on the identity question is, like, she's a great girl. That makes this easy.

Right. Whatever else may be shifting in this boy's identity, and I think there's a really, it's a really good question about identity development and this is happening. We'd be having a different conversation if, you know, for kids of any gender, the parent was like, in the person they're dating is a horrible influence.

Right. That's actually way harder, because you're like, I'm losing my kid to somebody who is into stuff. I don't like, who, if I try to insert myself, it's going to get even uglier. So at least in this letter, like, yeah, the kids' identity is being shaped by this.

Yeah, there may be a slow, you know, there may, just may not end well. They also may end up married, right, that happens, too. But to the degree that she is shaping or this relationship is shaping as identity, for

“how at least, probably rubbing off some good stuff on this boy, right?”

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And I know that it's going to turn into grounds that we're going to use in our garden. Try mill risk free for 90 days, and get 75 dollars off in mill.com/asklisa, and use code, you were saying that you can't really stop this, if somebody were to, like, that is so true, especially at this age, so how can you raise some concerns, like, in this letter, particularly the friendships, you know, she worries about the, the, the parent worries

about the guy friendships, how can you raise those concerns without sounding very dismissive of the relationship? What is the key one? And like, we're going to do you remember, and I remember this through grad school in college, where you have a friend who's like a really good friend, and then they start dating

somebody, and like, they're gone, like, they're, they've, they've ghosted you.

“Do you remember going through that or being that person?”

Yeah. Okay. So, yeah.

It doesn't always suit well with young people.

And I think they get it, but it's also, it can be pretty off-putting. And so I think there may be a little room in here for the folks to be like, you know, about it, we know you're really into this girl, you know, you don't want to be the guy who dumped his friends over a girlfriend. Like, that's not a good look.

I think you could say something as much as that, and like, he'll grumble, and that's fine. But I think there are times in parenting where without any hopes that, like, the kids amudely going to adopt our advice, we make general comments about how you treat people. And I think that that's a way you can kind of make a general comment like, you don't want to be that guy.

Having the perspective of time that us parents have and knowing what happens with first intense relationships and the statistics of them lasting, you know, decades later, how do you deal with that? When you've got a teen who's, this relationship is intense. What's your, how do you deal with it over time?

I mean, let's be honest, college could very well be just around the corner where you're probably likely not going to the same college. What's your sense about yourself? So this gets at something I've seen over the years that is actually one of my least favorite things to see clinically.

“And when I read or hear a letter like this, I'm like, oh, like, when I think about if this”

is a slow moving car accident, like, how is this going to crash? One thing I have seen if relationships like this continue, and they do get to the brink of the end of high school, and there is a question of, like, who's going where there's two things often at work. One is in heterosexual relationships, often the boy has enjoyed a closeness with the

girl that he's enjoyed with nobody else before. So like girls, as, you know, using broad gender generalizations, girls in general are pretty intimate with each other. They share a lot. They talk about feelings.

They do that. They experience when a boy starts dating a girl, especially in high school, and especially

when it's this intense and powerful.

That is often when if his earliest or first experiences of having this like tremendous emotional closeness. Okay. So I'm balanced. This is great, right?

Because you want boys to have the kind of support, the girls afford one another. So Rina, when it comes to what to do with a relationship or the decision and you're right, like, often around the college decision or, you know, things like it, they decide they're

“not going to stay together because it's impractical, right?”

It doesn't work. So they wouldn't have broken up otherwise, but it doesn't make sense to stay together. What I have seen is the girl turns to all her friends, and they support her. The boy, back to that island analogy, is by himself on an island, because the one person he was really talking to about intimacy things or close feelings or intense feelings was

his girlfriend. And so then what happens, and I've seen this enough, is that he keeps reaching out to her because she's the support and even after it's over, even after it's over, right? They decide to not be together, but he keeps reaching out to her. So then to make this slow moving car crash worse, and again, like I don't want people to

be like, oh my gosh, my kids shouldn't have been in a relationship, like this is what

If he's also iced his friends, right, that could exacerbate the situation. So I get why this parent sent this letter, because even if they're not in the letter or articulating like what if this goes, you know, this doesn't last forever, there's enough in this letter to indicate like, yeah, this could be pretty painful for this guy and maybe

the girl who knows what's going on with her friendships, who knows if this is her first

intimate connection, you know, I'm making gender generalizations, but like parents worry about these things. For exactly what you said, like we know that a lot of these, like very rarely do these turn into lifelong relationships. You were mentioning earlier about how, you know, often you see these relationships with

teens, they'll text each other in the morning when they wake up, takes each other at night. Do you think there should be parameters around phone use when it gets this heated and it's clearly affected other relationships? I don't know, I mean, you know, I think there should generally be parameters around phone use, like not in bedrooms, things like that, and I think that's true, all through adolescence

as long as kids live in your house, which I know puts me, like, you know how like flexible I am about most things like in this, puts me on the sort of rigid end of something, which is pretty unusual. Do you think that, if this boy is either physically with the girl or digitally with the girl, which is what's basically being described, there's probably room to say, you know

what the phone does not come to the dinner table, the phone should not be present when

“your friends are around, like, you need to actually have other face-to-face interactions,”

it can all be her all the time, and, you know, that may be some friction and that's probably some friction worth having, and again, you know, if the kid pushes back like, you know, this is what I want, you know, you guys don't like her, you know, her folks, his folks can be like, we have no problem with her, this is about basic respect and decency for the people who are in your presence, and we're going to ask that of you, and you can be

grumpy and more cool with that.

You know, the one big overarching theme of our podcast that I've always felt, and you've

helped me understand, is conversations, conversations, conversations, they don't have to be lengthy diatribes, but at least talking about it because, you know, I had never thought of the impact a deep intense relationship would have on my other relationships, and the perspective of time, knowing those other relationships might actually be a touch more valuable or equally valuable, you know, than this very intense romance.

So when you look at that, first of, I want to step back for a second to ask you, what

“is the best way to support a teen who might be going through a heartbreak, because it's”

very interesting to hear you say that, what's your advice for parents who are dealing with a very intense romance that ends suddenly in the teenagers? Oh, this is just the worst. The good news is, if a family is already there, we have that episode that we did a while back about, how do I help my, how do I support my heart broken son, and I've actually

gotten some really nice DMs to my Insta about like that coming in handy for some folks. I think that what we want to remember is one of the number-one rules about adolescence is that their feelings are more intense, and they can rapidly lose perspective, especially when those feelings are really, really activated. So the kid who's heart is broken, that is going to feel so awful.

And it's backed what you were saying earlier, like, let's not lose sight of how powerful

this stuff is, because sometimes adults can be like, oh, it's puppy love, or they're just teenagers, or you don't really know what love is, like, that is not true, and that is not helpful. Right? That's how you be dismissive.

Right?

“You're asking about, like, how do you not be dismissive?”

That's how you be dismissive. So we have to really honor the intensity of the pain that they're in, and also we have to hold for them the idea that they will be okay and they will get through this, because it doesn't feel like that to them. That feels like my heart is broken, it is all in fixable, that was my one love I will

never love again. And I think that that's really where we say, like, I know this hurt so much, and maybe we say I've been there, which usually teenagers don't want to hear, but you will get through this, and what kind of ice cream would you like, and should we go find the puppy, and should we, you know, like, you do all of the comforting, you just, you just love on them, because

it really is hard. And I actually have found clinically it's harder now, because their whole day gets, becomes a vacuum of where that person used to be, right? Like, when we were in high school, like we were hanging out with our friends because we couldn't hang out with our partner all the time, or we couldn't talk to them a night or whatever,

like, now it is a massive cavity in their life because of the digital connection that gets out with each other. That's a great point, that's a great point to remind parents about. Now that I'm 55 and solidly in the menopause, I spend a lot of my time at the gym now,

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relationship like this?

“I think the biggest, maybe easiest mistake to make would be trying to step in, right?”

Having this sort of midlife knowledge, having a awareness of like, I love my son, or I love my kid, and I see a very painful heartbreak coming down the line because he's like "Don't put his friends, he's all day all the time with her." This isn't going to last forever. I want to try to do something now to head that off at the past.

So I'm going to say to him, "Maybe you should be hanging out with your friends more. Why are you hanging out with her all the time or, you know, maybe you, you know, like, I'm going to try to get in there and change things." Super well-meaning, totally understandable.

The nature of any teenager around anything is the second and the adult is like, "I'm going

to try to make you do something different than you're doing." By a reflex, they're like, "I'm going to hold tighter to the thing I have." And that's before we even get to the thing that this guy has is a girl he is like mad about, right? So like, it's just like, it is so Romeo and Juliet, like it is so like the harder you work to keep them away from each other, then where they're going to drive towards each other.

Great example. Yeah.

“It's so hard, but so I think like, I'm so grateful that the parent wrote us, right?”

We're like, "He's random ladies that they don't know and it's like takes it away from family life." So I think that I think that it's just going to be a lot of what is fair to ask of this kid. You know, like, you know what, we want you to dinner. You know what? Don't, don't be rude to your friends. But I think a lot of the worries the parent may have, they're going to have to tell somebody else. I don't think it's going to work in any,

but there's not going to be a good outcome from airing all of these to the boy. When you look at a situation like this that we looked at some of the common mistakes that parents make, but is there anything else when you step back that you may be in your counseling in relationships and family relationships that you wish you could arm parents with as they go in and are dealing with this?

Well, it's interesting. I think about, it's funny how much mileage we're getting out about out of it. I think about our, our episode about fan fiction, right? Yeah. And we're compromising on, a couple of weeks ago, like romantic development is part of healthy development, sexual development is part of healthy development, right? So like,

“I think as soon as we get to kids and teenagers and romance and, like, of course, given”

the intensity of this relationship, the parents are like, "Oh my gosh, are they having sex?" I mean, like, all of these things are going to be on a parent's mind. Um, I think we come at it so readily from a perspective of, this is risky, this is dangerous,

is actually part of healthy and natural and, you know, positive development, the better. And then we now, I'll tell you something else. This sounds like a nice relationship. Like, it sounds like they treat each other well. Like, it's definitely big and it's definitely

“crowding at other things and that's not an issue. I am always so happy when that's how”

kids first start their romantic lives. With something kind, something mutual, something tender.

Um, even if it doesn't last, if these two treat each other well, they're both learning what relationships really should feel like. I will take that any day over a kids initiation into the romantic world, being a relationship that feels unkind or coercive or unhealthy, like often also super intense, then you have two problems. One is, they're getting hurt,

they're going to get hurt more as this thing goes on. And the other is, you actually have

to help them walk back and understand, that's not what relationships should look like you should be looking for something else. So at least these kids are laying down a template of this feels good and we are good to each other. This is what I'm going to be looking for down the line two. I'm laughing because I'm not sure if your advice is for teens or for people married for many, many decades. I could also use that same wrong term of how size shows up. Yeah,

this is how relationship should be. This is how we should be treating one another. There's just

“whether you're married or divorced. I think that you have a similar family. Yeah, absolutely.”

So Lisa, what do you have for us for parenting to go? I can't believe this is never come up,

but I'm so glad I can bring it up now. Venus, so much of good parenting is inviting one's tongue. So much of doing a good job as a parent is in what you don't say. And I don't feel like we get credit for it right when you keep your mouth shut. There's not a lot of credit to be had. It's really hard. It's really frustrating. But I think this is the perfect letter to say that on.

“Kind of like so much of getting it right in family life is not saying the thing you really”

sometimes want to say. Hard to do. Very hard to do. Well, thank you, Lisa. And next week, we are going to talk about another really important topic. Teen Depression in suicide in the year 2026. What do we need to know? We have a fabulous guest who has been a friend of the pod for a long time and come on before Dr. Jonathan Singer. So he'll join us next week with a little bit of update and what we need to think about on this topic. I'll see you next week. I'll see you next week.

Vice or intervention. If you have concerns about your child's well-being, consult a physician or mental health professional. If you're looking for additional resources, check out Lisa's website at Dr.LisaDemore.com.