This article is one of what will be many exploring the reasons young people need a community of support in learning how to relate to the opposite sex. It is part of what I refer to as a “pathway of hope from puberty to matrimony”.
Developing a ‘Romantic Persona’
As we grow up we develop a self identity, and we can usefully think of it as including various personae. These are ways of identifying oneself and relating to others. So I am … a child of my parents, a brother or sister, a boy or girl. Then I go to school and develop a way of being ‘the me I am when I am at school’ which might be a bit different from ‘the me I am at home’. Also I am … a friend, and a different kind of friend to different people, or different among different groups of people.
With puberty one enters a new phase. I am … a boy or girl attracted in a new way to the other sex and perhaps attractive to the other sex in a new way.
So the term persona is being used here to mean a way of thinking, feeling and acting that represents some aspect of who I am. Think of movie actors. Their profession involves becoming accomplished at seeming to be a particular kind of person - that required for their current role. We all understand the difference between who actors are in reality and the kind of personae they create for a particular roles.
Learning a New Role
I am using the term persona here as well as the term identity. By persona I mean something a bit like acting, since it is somewhat experimental. I’m not sure at first who the ‘me’ is who interacts with the opposite sex.
I might try different approaches. I might hide in my shell a bit, taking things very cautiously. Or I might be prone to overdoing things a bit and not making a good impression. These are the kind of fluctuations you would expect of an actor trying on an unfamiliar role, one he or she hasn’t played before.
The difference is of course that this ‘acting’ is happening in real life, and the performance I am trying to perfect is my eventual ‘romantic identity’.
Such a romantic identity is consolidated as I learn more about myself, especially who I am when relating to the opposite sex in a situation of ‘potential romantic interest’.
Relating to the other sex simply as friends, with no expectations of any romantic kind is much easier. It still requires learning new things, but there isn’t the same feeling of pressure. There is not as much at stake.
At each step I try to integrate these new personae into my basic sense of self, aiming to include them all in harmony. Yet there might be points of tension between them. For example, I might feel some tension between who I am at home, as a child of my parents, and who I am with my friends.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, with puberty there begins a process of developing what could be called one's ‘romantic identity’.
We could distinguish between persona and identity in this way. A persona is partial. It also stands out from my already established identity as being a bit experimental. It is a new facet of my identity ‘in development’. It will be a bit unstable initially but then stabilise as I master the different ways of feeling and acting I have developed to express this new persona. Eventually, hopefully, it becomes well integrated into your basic sense of self, your self identity.
New Ways of Feeling and Acting
Developing a ‘romantic identity’ involves learning new ways of feeling and acting in relation to the other sex. It involves your sense of who you are as masculine or feminine in a new way, charged with a new energy and significance. It is a developing sense of ‘what is it about me that might be attractive to the other sex, and why’. And ‘what is it about members of the other sex that attracts me, and why’.
Importantly, it is not just a new awareness but a new way of presenting yourself to others, which can include new ways of dressing, speaking, and moving.
This is a subtle and complex process, and one that commonly takes a long time. It might involve a fair amount of experimentation. A noticeable part of this is manner of dress and presentation.
This is especially notable in teenage girls, who experiment with how to look attractive, trying different ‘looks’ and trying to pick up some sense of what ‘works’, while also trying to keep this developing persona close enough to their core sense of identity to feel authentic.
Teenage boys will typically try to adopt a cool demeanour, and focus on physical prowess as a key marker of masculinity. Some will be the ‘class clown’; others will be the ‘broody loner’; others the ‘nice guy’; and so on.
‘Under Construction’
During most of the teens it is probably overstating it a bit to call this a ‘romantic identity’. However, it is the early stage of a process that by young adulthood appears more clearly as a quest to develop and consolidate a romantic identity.
The early stages are fairly elementary, and not uncommonly teens will adopt a fairly restricted persona of some kind.
That is not a bad thing, as it helps to simplify and keep under control what could otherwise become problematic due to immaturity. By late teens and early twenties this process of developing a romantic identity moves more to centre stage. This is because the task of finding someone to marry is now much closer.
Some are ready for this much sooner than others. This makes their quest more personal. Yet they are probably mixing socially with others who still feel that it is a long way off. They will want to keep things a bit less personal, and still feel themselves to be very much in learning mode about the other sex in general rather than being ready to try and find ‘the one’.
Starting to Get Serious
It is this period of young adulthood that I want to focus on here. It is that period prior to being ready for courtship, but involving a strong interest in spending time with, and learning more about, the other sex and about oneself.
It is fairly common in the genre of dating advice to advise young people not to take a sexual interest in the other sex but to focus on friendship. This is good advice, as far as it goes, but it often leaves something very important unaddressed, or at least obscure.
There are not just two ‘modes’ of interest, the friendship-type or the sexual-type. There is a third, intermediate between them, that could be called something like the ‘attraction-type’. It is not sexual in a direct sense, but nor could it be adequately characterised simply as friendship.
It is interaction in the field of ‘potential romantic attraction’ but not oriented directly or immediately to finding ‘the one’. It is this field of interaction that is relevant to what I am saying here about developing a romantic identity.
It is quite a different thing to be simple friends, or to be friends with the added dimension of ‘potential romantic attraction’. You might be quite confident and comfortable relating to the other sex when it is simply friendly acquaintanceship, yet feel awkward and out of one's depth once the potentially romantic dimension is added.
The task of developing a romantic identity occurs in this field in between potential-marriage-type interest and friendship-type interest.
Friendly Acquaintances
It might be worth making a comment here on what is meant by ‘friendship’ between the sexes. Most of what we are dealing with is probably best called ‘friendly acquaintanceship’ rather than friendship pure and simple. We commonly use the word ‘friends’ to mean those we are on friendly terms with, but we also use ‘friend’ to mean close friend.
An Example
Let's clarify by considering a case. A group of young men are friends, and this notion of friendship includes the right to simply drop in to see one another at home without any pretext, but just to hang out. Let's say they are friends also to a group of young women, but such friendship does not normally include the right for one of these young men to simply drop in to hang out with one of the young women.
There is a different sense of ‘distance’ such that one would not simply presume to drop in unannounced and expect to just hang out one on one. Yet if a group of the young women lived in a house together, or were simply gathered at one of their homes, it would not feel inappropriate if a group of their young male friends simply dropped in to see ‘what's happening’.
Only Friends
This would be the normal case, but let's say a young man and woman are not romantically involved, but each feels entitled to simply drop in to see the other just to hang out, this would usually be ‘friends’ pure and simple. Really it would be more like cousins who were close. I am not sure how common this is but it would have the effect of putting someone in what is often called the ‘friend zone’. This has significant implications for any potential for future romantic involvement.
Friendship-With-Some-Distance
So when I am talking about friendship-type attraction and contrasting it with potential-marriage-type attraction the ‘friendship’ I mean is more like the first case, of the group of friends where the young men keep a different kind of distance from the young women than to each other.
There is not the degree of presumption about individual closeness.
When people give dating advice and suggest focusing on friendship and not on the sexual I assume that they also mean this differential kind of friendship between male and female. This changes with courtship and becomes a closer kind of friendship, but not with the risk of being put in the ‘friend zone’ because they have already at least implicitly clarified that they are attracted to each other in a way that could lead to marriage.
The balance that needs to be found during the pre-courtship stage of meeting and getting to know several or many members of the other sex with some ultimate hope to find a spouse is that which keeps open the possibilities of both ‘friendship mode’ and ‘potential marriage mode’.
The space held open between them is the field of what I am calling ‘attraction mode’.
There is an awkwardness about this ‘attraction mode’. It is a shifting balance between the potential-marriage and friendship-modes, and it can be hard to work out what you feel and whether you should act on it, or wait and keep exploring further. In what I am calling ‘potential-marriage-mode’ the possibility of marriage is usually left unstated, being a tacit recognition that neither would want to voice such a possibility at this stage.
The Sexual Preempts the Romantic
In the absence of a set of clear cultural conventions and a structured pathway through this ‘attraction’ phase there is a strong danger that young men and women will not clarify any of this adequately but simply drift into a sexually active relationship which is not really one thing or another.
Many not only bypass courting but even bypass dating in any definite sense. They just drift from hanging out to hooking up to living together.
This does not stand them in good stead for the future of their relationship, as statistics clearly show, and as common sense should make clear, but seemingly doesn't. The value of engaging seriously in developing one's romantic identity through clear and purposeful relating in attraction mode is that you know who you are and who your partner is, why you have decided to embark on a journey leading to a sexual relationship, and why this should pass by way of courtship, engagement and marriage.
One of the pivotal questions it clarifies is – in what sense am I attracted to this person?
Otherwise you are left with unresolved questions such as – have I taken an easy option so as not to be lonely? Are we really even friends? Should I have waited to find someone better for me? Is the attraction just a passing thing, or does it point to something deeper and more enduring about this person? What is it that really attracts me to this person?
‘Match Practice’
Attraction mode requires more than a focus on friendship.
Let's use sport as an analogy. If the game played on the field is marriage, and friendship is being a team supporter, then developing a romantic identity is being on the training squad. If you never intend to marry you can be content simply being friends. However, if you think you might want to marry a particular person, but you are not ready yet, it would not be enough only to be a friend, a ‘supporter’. At some stage you would have to get into ‘training’.
This training is not just about the practical or simple friendship aspects of marriage, but also about who I am as distinctively masculine or feminine. Because I don't only need to know who I am in non-sexual matters. It is precisely in the realm of ‘romantic feeling’ that I need to train.
What does this mean? For one thing, you have to work out what role attraction plays in the relations between the sexes, and what kind and degree of importance it has in the choice of a spouse.
Marriage is not a merely pragmatic arrangement, but if possible should also be something passionate. There is nothing wrong with wanting strong attraction to be a significant factor in who you marry. On the other hand, what kind and degree of importance should it have? This can't be worked out only in theory. You have to learn what it feels like and how to interpret one's actual feelings.
You cannot properly go out on the field and play ‘full contact’ at this stage. But you can play ‘practice matches’ with modified rules, in which your feelings are engaged in the relevant way, but in which everyone knows it is a ‘game’.
It is important to note here that ‘game’ does not mean superficial or lacking in seriousness.
Dating As Match Practice
An example of such ‘match practice’ is a traditional style date, with a clear understanding beforehand that neither party is promising anything, yet there is an undertone of potential romantic meaningfulness.
That is, the exact status of each one’s romantic feelings is deliberately left unstated, but neither are they aiming to treat each other as ‘mere’ friends.
It is the kind of intentional ambiguity that characterises games – it does not really matter who wins or loses, but we choose to act as if it does. We invest some emotional content in something, yet we are not bound to do so, and the amount of our investment can vary.
The dating I am talking about here is not courting. In courtship, although the commitment is not yet definitive, it openly has the intention of leading towards marriage pending further discernment.
On the other hand I am not speaking of a merely conventional date, such as friends agreeing to attend a social function together because it is the convention that people attend with a partner and they both want to go. This might indeed be mere friendship with no undertones of romantic interest.
A Communal Interest
In my view, as a community we need to develop a set of customs, etiquette, events, and formation that comprises this ‘training structure’ for the development of romantic identity.
If it is all left to a fluid and informal arrangement there is simply too much ambiguity, too little clarity, for young adults to gain this type of ‘training’ including ‘match practice’.
This would usually take the form of a structured series of social events and some associated educational-formational opportunities that provide a training ground in the development of romantic identity.
The art required is to help young people enter deliberately into that field of ambiguity of feeling and learn how to negotiate that process.
To make that possible, the structured and intentional events aim to clarify some things but leave other possibilities open.
An Example
Let us imagine a ‘dating program’ where people enrol and agree to go on three dates in a month, with three different people chosen at random from those enrolled. This takes initial attraction out of the equation in choice of partner, but not in some of the feelings involved. Ideally each participant would have a mentor to debrief with individually.
It is not unlikely that many would have preferred to have drawn someone else’s name. But in the debrief they are asked to explain what kind and degree of attraction they felt for their partner and why. This process is part of the deal they agree to in advance.
They commit to setting aside their spontaneous preferences to try and learn something about the other person, and about themselves through their emotional reactions.
For those willing to enter into various social opportunities of this kind, and to participate in the associated formative process, there should be accelerated learning, compared to those who just try to make their way through a completely unstructured dating environment, that is, if dating is still even a custom in their world. The events would often be communal rather than individual. Dances have great potential and there are many ways that dances can provide opportunities for developing one's ‘romantic identity’.
A Typical Difficulty: All or Nothing
One of the typical difficulties in developing one's romantic identity is a propensity to feel ‘all or nothing’.
Take the case of the dating program above. If you already knew all or most of the prospective dates it is not unlikely that you would already have what feel like definite ‘yeses’ and ‘noes’ about many of them.
This way of feeling prematurely closes off the romantic ambivalence you might otherwise feel, so that it could undermine the effectiveness of anything like such a dating program. You would just be going through the motions and not learning anything much.
Recognising this in advance, many might decline to get involved in such a program in the first place.
Their only preoccupation is to make a beeline for the most attractive prospect available. This is the only approach that feels ‘real’.
But if you take that approach you are likely to just lurch from one ‘all or nothing’ possibility to another, for the probabilities of mutual attraction in each case are quite low. Each time it feels completely real, with all the trepidation and angst that accompanies this.
This is not a recipe for developing the interior ease that would allow the process to ‘flow’. It is also not a great way to learn, because you are likely to just keep repeating the same behaviour over and over.
Not only that, remember we defined this period and process as prior to courtship. It is inherently an ambiguous experience because not only do you not know who might find you attractive, you also quite likely don't know if you are ready for marriage either. And the two can be interrelated. You are hoping to gain the advantage of spending ‘potentially romantic’ time with members of the other sex, while also not signalling that you are trying right now to find ‘the one’, but nevertheless not closing off that possibility.
But this process is not simply about ‘learning to be friends’. That can happen in all sorts of other settings that do not raise the implications of romantic potential. It can also backfire, because the ‘all or nothing’ propensity works in both directions. The discomfort with ambiguity not only leads to undue preoccupation with the most attractive, it can also lead to prematurely putting someone in the ‘friend zone’. In both cases what is lost is the capacity to stay in the ‘zone of ambivalence’.
Of course all this is easy enough to say, but hard to do – which is why most people struggle with it. What is the solution?
What I am proposing here is that it would be good if individuals were not expected to negotiate this process alone, but many would need, or at least benefit from, a more structured, supportive environment. That way individuals can decide to enter into some of these opportunities and learn gradually. The discomfort of ambivalence needs to be moderated by a supported approach. That way an individual can proceed by a series of small steps where everyone else involved also understands the purpose and the ground rules. The process needs to include social activities and if possible an accompanying formative process, which in its simplest form just means someone to talk to about it. Many people don’t have that, or have no experience of it, or don’t know that it might be helpful.
Preparation for Marriage
Some readers might be thinking – isn't this all a bit elaborate for a process that, after all, only needs to find you a spouse? Sure, the unaided process might be a bit bruising for some, but isn't that unavoidable?
Firstly, no, the process isn’t only about finding a spouse. And secondly, some of that ‘bruising’ can be quite serious.
Developing a romantic identity is not only about finding a spouse. It is also an important part of preparation for marriage. What is it that one could learn that would be important in marriage?
There are many, but a key one is learning more about the dynamics and significance of attraction. What is it that accentuates or diminishes friendship-type attraction, and what accentuates or diminishes sexual-type attraction? Neither of these simply look after themselves after marriage. They require regular, intentional effort and deepening understanding.
Take sexual attraction. It is not as though this stays constant in marriage. It can wax and wane quite a bit, and if you don’t know what to do about it then serious consequences can follow.
Your ‘romantic identity’ needs to be fostered throughout marriage, not abandoned once the honeymoon is over.
So what is being proposed here as a structured process to help young adults develop their romantic identity is not meant to stop when they enter courtship or get married. There needs to be another communal, structured, supportive approach for married couples.
A Disheartening Environment
Today’s ‘dating scene’ is often a disheartening experience, with little or no grounding in community, little if any support, and for many, few opportunities to even meet members of the opposite sex in any kind of helpful environment. Dating seems like a thing of the past, except for dates arranged online, a process that can be disheartening and futile for many.
The fact that some people do OK and get through this period without too much drama should not be allowed to disguise the fact that for many more that won’t be the case. This is why I believe a communal approach is needed, whatever form it takes, where young people are not left to flounder in what is often a very unhelpful and dispiriting environment.
Even though there are many couples that do eventually find each other, some of whom marry and others who only cohabit, many of these marriages and relationships fail later due to the lack of a good grounding in the first place.
From Low to High Expectations
I believe we need to have higher expectations for a community and culture that actively and systematically fosters a positive and helpful environment in which young people can discover and develop their romantic identities and find suitable marriage partners.
This will need to be supported by married couples who themselves participate in such a community, working together to provide for their own children and that of their friends an organised and positive ‘pathway of hope from puberty to matrimony’.
In the process married couples themselves need to be able to find support in their own relationships, to deepen their understanding of each other as they go through different stages of their lives together, including learning more about the emotional-sexual nature of the opposite sex, about the dynamics of attraction, and how to stay in love throughout their lives.
A tall order perhaps, but what is the alternative?