What do you think of young teens dating?

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I am going to be 20 in November and I've never dated anyone. I had this guy in high school I hung out with for 3 years but he wasn't a boyfriend and now he's at school to be a scientist and we don't talk anymore. He only talked to me when I was the geek girl wannabe doctor and now that I'm the purple haired goth punk type wannabe film writer/actress, he stopped liking me and I think he thinks I'm weird now. He also probably thinks I am a loser for being home and not studying while he is at college learning microbiology.

Exactly. Thank you for adding onto what ive been saying.

Dating as a teenager (especially older teenager like 16-18) isn't a bad thing.

It's better to have lost and love to have never loved at all.

To me, this means 'Learn from your mistakes'.

I'm a 16 year old guy and always been obsessed with girls/wanted a relationship but never had one. People tell me 'oh, it's not THAT great' 'you don't want to date as a teenager, trust me you don't.' and all this other stuff but I can't help but disagree with it.

Like you said it's good to experiment a little and 'test the waters'.

Dating is good for NT's because it teaches them about love and dating early on.

But it is even better for us aspies to start early.

We learn social skills, dating ettiquette, how to be a good boyfriend/girlfriend, etc.

Most aspies ALREADY start behind the NTS.

If we hold off dating until we are 20 or 25 or older, we're only slipping and falling more and more behind.

In my opinion this is a trap many aspies have fallen into. I see people on this very website aged 30, 40 or even older and have never had a single relationship.

Like I said it's not a bad thing if you have never been in a relationship - you have avoided the drama, the jealousy, the gossip, the cheaters, the liars, the users, the crazies, the creepies, pregnancies, etc.

But it's NOT a good thing either, in any possible way - you have also avoided all the potential positives - social skill improvement, gained experienced, etc.

And you also have had to put up with the loneliness and the misery of being dateless.

Not only this, but sometimes when you have a relationship in high school you might end up staying with them for the rest of yoru life..

You never know. ESPECIALLY if you are in an older relationship. If you get a boyfriend or girlfriend at 17 it's much more likely to last than at 14 or 15.

A cousin of mine is engaged to his high school sweetheart at just 24. Just think - that could be YOU.

My advice to all other aspie teenagers:

If you're under 15 dont worry about relationships, just worry about friends and studies.

If you're 16 or 17, there's nothing bad about starting to pursue love or dating while you still have the opportunity to meet people (it is much harder to make friends after high school or university because you have much less of a chance of being surrounded by people the same age as you).

I remember hearing about kids "dating" in elementary school! I guess kids want to grow up fast. One of my friends told me she "made out" with this one boy when she was about 9. Maybe I just lived in a weird place as a kid.....

Yep...young kids sometimes are hypersexualized these days.

It's ridiculous to make out in elementary school.

I find: when people grow up too fast, they die too fast, too.

Nothing wrong with teens dating, but becoming obsessed is taking it too far, for any age.
at no point in life should you run into (social) problems from not having dated (enough).

it is understandable that girls go "sift" guys in discos, and even expect others to do so (they dont know any better, after all), but then again... 14 is clearly too young for that.

and thanks to those fumbled messed up experiences, now i am at least more familiar with a puckered up face. when one says "i'm waiting for him to do it", yes, kip, that is the English language.

i think i was around 10, in 5th grade when i started heating about people 'going out'. or 4th grade even, i just remember it was kids one grade above me. though i don't recall the term 'dating'.

the use of the term was prolly different than it's use in middle and high school, you probably didn't even have to kiss. i never saw anyone kissing.

i don't think my place was "weird". just expensive and touristy as hell.

Hm..., I haven't answered the title question yet.

I envy them.

Absolutely nothing wrong with it, if they're not doing drugs or other bad things

Never having done it, I can't totally rule out the hypothesis that it's an acquired taste, but, if it is, it's surely a mighty strange one, because I've been wanting to do it since my mid teenage years. Of course, I knew I wouldn't get to fulfill that desire anytime soon if ever.

In contrast, alcohol is known to be an acquired taste, and I'm still not really into it. Not even the fact that it was forbidden to me made me want it all that much as a teenager.



If you're not allowed to date, you'll do neither, and you won't get to decide yourself if or when you're ready.

I'm 17 and I'm just not interested in dating right now, its never really something I think about, I'm not gonna go out of my way to find a girlfreind

OP, my kids are close to your age and my thoughts on dating are that an exclusive relationship between two parties, neither of whom do their own laundry yet, is ludicrous. I think that if you are not responsible enough to take care of yourself if needed--no job, no driver's license, no house--then you have no business dating. This is my opinion and i see that there are those on this thread who disagree with me. So take it for what it's worth.

But this is why i think the way i do:

I agree with Meistersinger. One of two things happens when you date. Either you get married or you break up. Most of the time, at 14, you are going to break up. If you are doing it for the making out, it is pretty easy for the making out to lead to stuff that can get you pregnant or diseases. I tell my kids it is not worth the risk. Guess who deals with the fallout if, at this young age, they get pregnant/get someone pregnant, get some type of disease, etc. Yup, you guessed it, mom and dad. So, absolutely, i think i need to have a say in the whole matter since they are still under my roof and being supported by me and my husband.

Dating as an older teen--depends on the maturity of the two parties. I began dating my husband when i was 17 and he was 19. We got married two years later, right after i turned 19, and now wouldn't trade what we have for anything. We have been through our rough patches but we were too stubborn to give up on each other and it has served us well. At the time we got married, we were very young; but we both had driver's licenses and jobs; and we were earning enough money to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. We had a lot of fine tuning to do, but we knew the basics of taking care of ourselves such as basic cooking, laundry, and such like.

I think the most important thing is to keep the big picture in mind. When you are young, it is harder to see how your actions now affect your future, but they do. I think you are absolutely right not to waste your time at clubs at age 14.

You know, not everyone has a realistic chance of having a well-paid and stable job enabling them to have their own roof by seventeen, and it's becoming rarer and rarer these days. I don't think it's very fair to conclude today's teenagers are less responsible than you were at their age because of this.

You don't know how much I wish I could have been living independently at seventeen, so noöne could forbid me to have a girlfriend, but it wasn't exactly possible whatever way you look at it. In addition to other environmental factors, it also depends a lot on the way you're raised. My parents never expected me to work as a teenager or a young adult, and I lived too isolated (being an aspie helped here, of course) with them even to learn there could be another way. Needless to say, this also gave them the moral right to be entirely in control of my life. I only dared to ask them if I could start dating at twenty-two, and they told me it was still too early.

Yes, I know I should have been pulling my weight, but I was studying, hadn't been raised with the goal of making study and work compatible, and my parents were still paying for all my expenses and consequently telling me what to do in every regard. I had no time or resources of my own to break free from that situation, and this powerlessness is what I hate the most. Yes, I could have just kept applying myself and given up on anything else for a few more years, and then, at twenty-five or twenty-six, I might have had a chance to start gaining enough control over my life for a romantic relationship to be finally something other than a bad joke, but it's not normal to have to give up so much for so little. I'd have been so inexperienced so late with so many important things in life I'd never catch up with those who didn't have to see their youth go to waste like I did. So I got desperate, tried to reason with my parents so I could avoid this fate, and only managed to make it much worse.

This topic sickens me. To me, this is an unresolved issue since I was about the OP's age, and it looks like I'll carry it unresolved to my grave. I certainly can't resolve it with my parents anymore. Everyone seems to have this figured out one way or another, but, when discussing it, they act as though the opposite side doesn't exist.

Spiderpig, I'm not sure how you can be so positive that you will never find romance or resolve this issue with your parents. You're still here, yet, if you are posting...and lots of people find love later in life and become more independent later in life too.

After i wrote this, i realized i should have clarified one thing. I would let my children date if they were under my roof if they were either working or in college, as long as they were responsible, and basically caring for themselves. But at 14? NO! i see my 14 yr old being responsible, having a job...but i still cook for him, shelter him, do his laundry. This does not set him up to be ready to date. What if he would have a girlfriend and get her pregnant? Guess whose responsibility this would become. Even if he tried to do his best, his job is not something he could live on. Or support a child or family on. And he needs to finish school. Do you see? At 17, when i began dating my hubby, i was nearly done with school. Almost immediately upon graduating, i got a job, bought a car, and began taking steps toward being independent. By the time we got married two years later, he and i were able to live on our own.

I was more independent at a young age than some kids, especially now. In the 1980's and 1990's, when i was growing up, my life of getting a job as a young person was not that unusual either. Especially in rural communities like the one i was raised in. I was raised with a good work ethic. Right out of high school, I was not in any great job--it was minimum wage because i had no college education. But it was work. I was not too good to work hard and get dirty. The other thing that helped me to be more independent, ironically, was probably the fact that my dad is also an aspie. Much as he and my mom loved me and provided adequately for me, they were very poor. An aspie dad who has his own mental health problems and a hard time dealing with his own life doesn't have a lot left over to protect his kids with. Me and my brother had to kind of find our own way in life. No one handed anything to us except a good work ethic. There was no family money, no money to pay for a college education for us.

I don't know you and your situation Spiderpig. I can't say that i see only my way--i see how it is hard when you want to make your way in life but don't know how to go about it...but do you see my point too? it seems to me you are assuming that a romantic relationship is a rite of passage and that if a person doesn't have one, they somehow got gypped. In romance as well as finances, I would say again that i was never handed anything and never expected it. I am very glad for my husband and kids...but the world does not owe anybody love or sex any more than it owes them a living. All that i have--both family and material possessions--is a blessing and i am thankful for it. But i don't think it was owed to me any more than that anybody owed me money and a college education.

I look around and see how some of my friends have family money, parental support for a college education, and family property which enabled them to build homes, etc... and how these things made life easier for them. I never had any of that. Would it have been nice? Yeah, for sure.

Hubby and i sometimes look at how his sisters had their college education partially paid for by his parents and contrast it with our experience with his parents--we were in business with his dad for the first 4 years of our married life and his dad basically demanded all our time for the business while taking thousands of dollars from us and trashing our good credit all in the name of "putting it into the business." We never saw a dime of this--rather ended up paying thousands of dollars in business debt when we cut business ties with him. At the time, he tried to control us, feeling that he had a right to do this because we were in a business partnership. We were pulling our own weight and more in the partnership; but he didn't see us as equally valid when it came to decision making in the business and how we were to spend our time--he even wanted to have control over any free time we had outside of working responsibilities. But in order to free ourselves from his control we had to cut all financial and business ties completely with him.

Possibly to free yourself from your parents' control you will have to take the risk and cut financial ties with them completely. It wasn't easy to get out of that business, but it was the best thing we ever did. We had a lot of financial difficulty making our way on our own and paying his debts at the same time--but i will say i would starve before ever asking him for money. He felt he owned us body and soul and i still to this day can't stand to be around him for any great length of time although i must say the relationship improved tremendously after we severed the business ties.

I never really had much of a teen life--i was mostly busy working although i had a romantic relationship. How you look at it is a choice. Nobody owed me anything. Life is what you make of it. I will still take my life over any other life i can think of.

I'd gladly work my ass off in exchange for a romantic relationship and a chance to have children of my own, if only I could find a way. Especially if I could have started doing it as a teenager. But those years are gone, and it wasn't possible to do that without my parents' approval. Now, I'll be lucky if I get to work my ass off in exchange for survival, and maybe, just maybe, being free. And I'll be very old by then.

Spiderpig, i like your screen name btw. We are huge Simpsons fans here. I don't really know enough about your situation to be of much help, i guess. I don't know how old you are either...so really have no point of reference except what my experience has been. We were pretty much living hand-to-mouth back in the day. Renting an old house that went with the business that was so drafty that even when we put plastic over the windows in the winter, the curtains still blew when it was bitterly cold and windy in the winter. We mostly ate venison because we could harvest deer for crop damage and it was free. We got chicken when we raised and butchered our own. Once in a while we would go to the butcher shop and splurge on some sausage or dry beef.

I wouldn't trade those years for anything but neither do i want to go back and do it all again. It was HARD. I don't know what to tell you for your situation. But there came a point when we had to cut our losses and run and then make the best of what was left. Is there a way for you to do that? I wish you the best, however things turn out for you.