Tuesday 21 September 2010

Teenage Romantic Angst.

I want to put a word in for young people here. I think adults should be more attentive to, and understanding of, teenage angst. We have a tendency to laugh it off, and we shouldn’t. When teenagers say ‘I love him/her so much, but he/she doesn’t even notice me. I want to die,’ they mean it. It’s that serious; and why shouldn’t it be? Who has the right to insist that fretting over the mortgage payments is a ‘proper’ concern, but suffering over an unrequited infatuation isn’t?

Carmen asks what makes for maturity. Maybe part of it is in learning to understand that the severity of a concern has more to do with the effect than with some partial opinion on the gravity of the cause.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I want to respond to this, Jeff, as I think I do agree somehow and wish to add my own 2 cents (as usual). However your last paragraph completely baffles me. I got the part about Carmen's question but the rest..am I too stupid?

In general I think with every passing day I see the mess "adults" have made of this world and the relentless pressures they place on the young to fit into it (or fix it, or just cope). Unrequited infatuation, if not a worthier subject to pine over than one's mortgage payment, is at least a much more interesting subject.

JJ said...

Hi Della. I think I maybe overdid my taste for brevity. What I was trying to say was this.

We each have our own sense of what matters to us, and our emotional reaction to problems has more to do with that than with universally accepted notions of what’s ‘important.’ It’s true, of course, that failing to pay the mortgage has greater practical consequences than being ignored by the boy or girl you fancy rotten. But I think adults get too settled in their attitudes, and they’re too prone to dismiss the emotional turbulence that’s tearing some young person’s guts out. The darkness that’s descended on that person’s world is very real to them, and we should try to understand it in those terms. And it doesn’t only apply to young people. Plenty of adults are emotionally turbulent, too.

I suppose the bottom line is that it’s almost impossible for one person to fully empathise with another. We can’t completely feel what another person is feeling. But we can at least understand that fact and do our best.

Anonymous said...

True. Maybe we can't fully empathize but we all feel at one time or other similar degrees of pain, rage, happiness, or other emotion in varying degrees. The real problem is to stay open to understanding these moods, even with oneself. So if I'm happy it's too easy for me to laugh at myself when I wasn't and so on. Sometimes I think people are more like cats or dogs than we think we are – switching into modes of routine thinking and behavior and not making the effort to snap out of it when we should and try to reach someone who's in "another place."

JJ said...

I agree, Della, so the next question is this. I once read that the mind is incapable of remembering pain. It can remember a time when something hurt, and that the experience was unpleasant, but it doesn’t remember the pain itself. But pain is an emotion, so does the same apply to all emotion? Are we capable of remembering a feeling? If not, then the only we time we can truly empathise is when the feeling is shared for some reason.

lucy said...

Unrequited love is the most painful feeling.

JJ said...

I know, but see later post.