4/21/2014 Girls who get caught in a bad romance risk more than just their broken hearts | Jill

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Previous | Index
Girls who get 'caught in a bad
romance' risk more than just
their broken hearts
A study shows that bad relationships cause
girls real damage. The lesson? Teach young
women to value themselves
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Jill Filipovic
theguardian.com, Monday 21 April 2014 12.30 BST
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A new study shows just how harmful it is when girls define themselves
by their relationships. Photograph: Alamy
For high school girls, the reality of romance often
feels less like Cinderella and more like Kill Bill. And
while the emotional maturity level of your average
high school boy definitely doesn't help, the pressure
we put on girls to see relationships as cornerstones
of their identities is the real culprit.
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4/21/2014 Girls who get caught in a bad romance risk more than just their broken hearts | Jill Filipovic | Comment is free | theguardian.com
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25 to 45
That's the conclusion of a new study from the
University of New Mexico, which found that girls are
more likely than boys to experience negative mental
health effects when the reality of a given relationship
doesn't match up with their expectations of it.
"Romantic relationships are particularly important
components of girls' identities and are, therefore,
strongly related to how they feel about themselves
good or bad," the author of the study, Brian Soller, an
assistant professor of sociology and a senior fellow of
the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for
Health Policy at the University of New Mexico, said.
"As a result, relationships that diverge from what girls
envision for themselves are especially damaging to
their emotional well-being."
Boys, Soller said, don't exhibit the same negative
emotions because they don't identify themselves
according to their relationships. They identify
themselves by their interests including sports and
extracurricular activities. So when their romantic
relationships aren't what they envisioned, it doesn't
feel like as much like a personal failing.
The lesson of the study? Quit teaching girls to define
themselves by their romantic relationships.
That teaching happens formally and informally. n
many abstinence-based sex education programs,
girls play games that include picking all the petals off
a rose to symbolize the "fact" that they lose a
fundamental part of themselves every time they have
sex. At home in two-parent families, girls often see
mom doing more of the emotional labor of childcare
and partner-care than dad. We celebrate marriages
as the most important day of a woman's life,
expecting brides to spend thousands planning and
executing perfect weddings but it's much more rare
to hear someone tell a groom that the wedding is his
"big day," or hear a groom say he wants to look like a
prince on his wedding day. Women still
overwhelmingly take their husbands' surnames upon
marriage, literally naming themselves according to
their relationship. And even in the political realm,
women routinely reference their roles as mothers and
wives alternately to justify an opinion or to soften the
threat of their own power witness Michelle Obama
calling herself the "mom in chief," or the legions of
writers who cover issues around health and politics
but identify as "mom bloggers."
There's nothing wrong with valuing the relationships
in your life, romantic and not. For most of us, our
relationships are at least one key to our happiness.
But happiness is different from identity, and girls grow
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up not seeing relationships as potential value-adds to
an already-rich life, but as the defining factor of that
life. Of course they're devastated every time one
goes sideways.
We also can't separate what we teach girls about
relationships from what we teach them about sex.
The study itself looked at expectations of physical
intimacy participants were given cards to indicate
what physical acts they would like to see happen in
their relationships (hand-holding, kissing, sex) and
the order they wanted those acts to happen. A year
later, they repeated the process, only this time
indicating what actually happened in the relationship.
Then, researchers evaluated their mental health,
which was often poor.
American girls grow up in a culture where women are
ornamental, and a very particular type of woman with
a very particular type of body is used to represent sex
itself in advertisements for everything from cars to
web-hosting. But girls also hear that they are the
gatekeepers to sex, that having sex too soon or with
too many people will leave them damaged, and that
men don't respect the women who sleep with them.
Sex, girls learn, is a thing boys want and girls have,
but the girls aren't supposed to give it up too easily
and that sex isn't about their own desires, anyway.
Yet somehow, if girls just play by these contradictory
rules if they're pretty and sexy, but not sexual or
slutty their Disney-movie Prince Charming will just
ride up.
For girls and women, that combination of relational
identity and sexual schizophrenia is particularly toxic
and soul-crushing. Policy-wise, there's a lot to be
done: ending abstinence-only sex ed and finding
more funding for a diversity of educational programs
including art and music that can help students
forge individual identities and develop their talents
would be a start. Outside of schools, policies allowing
women to be equal players at work and in life would
go a long way in shifting assumptions around female
identity. These should include: paid leave for new
parents so that moms don't have to choose between
work and family and dads are expected to do both as
well; wide access to both contraception and abortion
with the understanding that women want to have sex
for pleasure and not just to reproduce; and state-
subsidized childcare so that parents aren't bearing
the burden alone.
But profound social shifts are even more important
than news laws. Some of those shifts, of course, will
come along with more progressive social policies. But
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A weekly column by Jill Filipovic, regular
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some we just have to take responsibility for
ourselves, including adult women modelling healthy
female self-identity apart from their relationships, and
adult men embracing the importance of their
relationships and displaying their capacity for
caregiving. t also means praising our daughters
more often for their talents, abilities and hard work,
and not just for their helpfulness, beauty and behavior
toward others. t means expecting our sons to be
emotionally competent, generous and sensitive to
how their actions impact the people around them.
There's no weakness in loving the people you love or
in prioritizing your family and significant other. But
there are dangers in a model of womanhood defined
by sacrifice and folding yourself into others. We all
want girls to develop positive self-esteem and feel a
strong sense of self-worth. But it's awfully hard to do
that in a society where, for girls and women, self-
identity is relational and not about yourself at all.
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