Dear Dategirl,
My daughter, husband, and I are all at odds over my daughter’s love life. She is a great kid, gets excellent grades, never gives us any trouble, and has been with her boyfriend for a little over a year. He is generally a good kid.
I am not certain that they’re sexually active, but I suspect they might be. The problem at hand is that her boyfriend’s parents have a gorgeous lake house about two hours from here. They have invited my daughter to spend a week with them there. The home is unbelievable—it was in Architectural Digest—and his parents and siblings will be there with them.
I’m inclined to let her go, but my husband is against the idea. He thinks the boy’s parents are too liberal and will encourage them to have sex and smoke pot. I think the real reason is that we’re not as wealthy as they are. We’ve had a bad year financially, but his embarrassment over our floundering monetary status is no reason to punish our only child!
—”Cool” Mom
Does your husband remember what 17 was like? Teenagers don’t need to be “encouraged” to have sex—it’s rare they think of anything else. Which doesn’t mean your daughter and her boyfriend are necessarily doing the nasty, but they sure as shit have thought about it. Often.
And, really, let’s face it; they’re probably doing it. Here are some places where 17-year-old Dategirl had sex: on a baseball diamond, in the back of a VW Bug, in a club bathroom, under a boardwalk, on a parental sofa while they were sleeping. At that age, a bed is a novelty location.
Which brings me to something you didn’t ask. You mentioned you only suspect they’re sexually active. While I think it’s great to give teenagers their privacy (note to my mom: Thanks for reading my angst-filled journal aloud to our entire family!), that doesn’t mean you should stick your head in the sand. With Planned Parenthood under attack and sex ed. being phased out in so many schools, I sincerely hope you’ve had “the talk” with her. If you haven’t, please live up to your “cool mom” moniker and introduce her to some form of birth control.
As for the trip, I agree with you. It sounds like a nice break, she’s going to be supervised(ish), and in a year she’ll be off at college anyway, free to fuck whomever and smoke whatever. Now we just need to get your husband on board. Maybe, as you suspect, he’s against the trip for bruised-ego reasons, but did it occur to you that it might just be that age-old dad’s fear of losing his little girl? Fathers tend to treat their daughters very differently than their sons. Take my unofficial brother-in-law: His boy can stay out late and gets high-fived for dating a different pretty girl every week, while he’d have his daughter locked away in a burqa if his wife would let him. I can see your husband thinking that while the boy’s parents may be present, they may not be watching his little girl with the hawk-like intensity he would prefer.
What I would do is convince your husband to meet the boys’ parents on economically neutral grounds—somewhere between Versailles and the trailer park. Talk about sleeping arrangements and any other concerns he might have, and let him see that they’re not pot-gobbling sex-pushers. Once he is reassured that everyone’s taking his fears seriously, there’s a better chance he’ll loosen up a little.
You might also remind him that no kid at home means blow jobs in the kitchen, doggy-style on the sofa, and missionary on the floor. For you two, not your daughter.
