Is My Son Too Obsessed With His Girlfriend?

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The following transcript has been automatically generated by an AI system and should be used for informational purposes only. We cannot guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the information provided.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
First love, the intensity is just profound. They are in touch all day long. You know, you don’t want to be the guy who dunked his friends over a girlfriend.

Reena Ninan:
How can you raise those concerns without sounding dismissive?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It is so Romeo and Juliet, we’re watching a slow accident in motion. If she leaves him, he is going to be in trouble.

Reena Ninan:
What do you think the biggest mistake is that parents make when responding to a really intense relationship?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think the biggest, maybe easiest mistake to make would be.

Reena Ninan:
Love. Love in the time of the teenage years, what’s your take on all that, Lisa?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Oh man. Fresh off Valentine’s Day. This is top of mind for a lot of people. You know, in general, teens are not dating as much as they used to be, and I think it’s one of those things where we can end up with a, no matter what teens do, people give them a hard time. If they’re very, very emotionally entangled with one another, we freak out. If they don’t date enough, we freak out.
It’s intense. I have cared for teenagers who are in some pretty intense relationships and I don’t think we should ever underestimate the power of these. I was so glad to get this letter.

Reena Ninan:
Let’s get right into it. I want to read this to you.
Hello, Dr. Lisa and Reena. My son is a sophomore in high school and has had a girlfriend for almost six months now. The relationship has grown from hanging out occasionally to spending nearly every weekend together and communicating constantly over text, Snapchat, phone. She’s a really sweet girl and I can tell she makes him happy, but I’m worried that things might be a bit too serious for their age. I’m also concerned about how this might affect his friendships and his ability to continue figuring out who he is at this stage. He used to spend time gaming online with his friends, but that doesn’t happen anymore. Even when his friends are over, I noticed he’s often on his phone texting or snapping his girlfriend. The constant communication seems intense, I know that his friends are getting together and I don’t hear him mentioning anything about it. Makes me wonder if he’s not being invited or if he’s choosing not to go so he can spend time with his girlfriend instead. I want to keep the lines of communication open with him and be supportive, but how do we get this to dial down a notch? He’s a great student, earns great grades and is active in sports. I just want to make sure he maintains a healthy balance. Thank you so much for your time and for all the guidance you provide to parents like me.
So Lisa, how common is it to have a relationship in the teenage years, this intense?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s not that common. I would say if you looked across, like if we did a statistical study of how many teenagers have something that’s this, intense as this one is, I don’t hear it that often, but I hear it and it definitely happens. And Reena, there’s something that’s different about today’s relationships between teenagers than the very intense relationships that we had as adolescents, if we did. And it’s mentioned in the letter, which is the 24/7 aspect of it. Kids who are dating, especially if they have their phones in their rooms, they wake up and they say good morning to each other. They text each other or call each other to say good morning. They say goodnight at the end of the day and then they are in touch all day long. They’re in touch all day long, whether at school and if they have phones at school with their phones at school, but then the second they get their phones again, they’re back together.
I remember sort of watching this evolve in my time as a clinician where first I just started caring for teenagers who were in these really intense relationships, pre-phones, and I remember even them being like, man, they are more intertwined with one another throughout the day than I am with my own husband. It really is amazing who I like, I like the guy, but we don’t hang out nearly as much as teenagers can when they’re dating. And then tech came on the scene and then took that up several notches.
There are times in thinking about today’s teenagers and caring for them that we can fall back on what we did as adolescents. That’s a little bit true here, but it’s less true because the intensity is just, it’s profound in terms of how much space they can take up in one another’s lives.

Reena Ninan:
The mom writes here, she’s a little bit worried about his identity at this point. Are you concerned about him being overly defined by his relationship being so attached to this girlfriend?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I don’t know what I think I’m going to think about what do I think. What do you think? What do you think if you think about your kid or kids like this? Yeah, what would your take be?

Reena Ninan:
Man, young love, first love. That is an emotion I feel like 50 years later, just that first crush and when you can talk and it’s just a wonderful thing that I wish we could bottle up and sell, quite frankly.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s true, but rest in that for a minute. This is on steroids because everything for teenagers are on steroids and then first love and oh my gosh. So let’s have a moment of reverence for this is part of life, this first overwhelming all consuming relationship and yeah, can it crash and burn in really ugly ways? A hundred percent, but I like what you’re saying just about this is powerful and profound and kind of universal and timeless, the kind of consuming nature of this. Okay, so what would you do if you were the parent or what do you think or about the identity question? What’s your take on that?

Reena Ninan:
Well, first off, I will tell you I think it is, I feel it in different social circles that I see of different kids this age that it’s not so common. I felt like when we were growing up, having a boyfriend was a big thing and that was so important and if you didn’t have one, you were really left out. It’s not the case today, which I love and you made a point of saying that, but one thing I do love is my kids have made such great friend choices and they’ve got a great circle since they were very, very little and I think the fact that he might be left out of the boy group because he’s got this relationship and the other guys don’t, I worry about that. And also I think these years are important. I’ve got friends in high school that I still stay in touch with and I love and I just wonder, you’re making a lot of life choices in those years, the high school years that kind of set the foundation. So should the parent be worried?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Right. I mean it is very well described. The way he’s kind of getting onto this relationship island with this girl and leaving his friendships, getting cut off from the friendships. I can see the worry, right? That this is going to start to become what he’s about and what he’s all about. Bluntly, Reena, I don’t think there’s a lot you can do to stop it. I mean, I don’t think this is the kind of thing you can police. I don’t think you can really intervene. So I think for the parents, they might be like we’re watching a slow accident in motion. If she leaves him, he is really going to be in trouble.
Because he’s kind of dumped his friends in some ways. And there is one place I think where there is grounds for intervention, which is around when he is texting with her in front of his friends. I actually do think that’s a place where a parent might be like, dude, you know what? You can enjoy your relationship with your girlfriend, but don’t be rude to your friends. I think there’s a place where I would actually as a parent make a comment. What’s helpful in this letter on the identity question is she’s a great girl that makes this easy. Whatever else may be shifting in this boy’s identity. And I think it’s a really good question about identity development and this is happening, we’d be having a different conversation if for kids of any gender, the parent was like, and the person they’re dating is a horrible influence.
That’s actually way harder. Like I’m losing my kid to somebody who is into stuff I don’t like, who if I try to insert myself, it’s going to get even uglier. So at least in this letter, the kid’s identity is being shaped by this. This may not end well, they also may end up married. That happens too. But to the degree that this relationship is shaping his identity for now at least probably rubbing off some good stuff on this boy, right? I mean great teenage girls or great teenage girls and they’re often wonderful, wonderful influences on themselves and the people around them and the guys they date if they’re dating guys.

Reena Ninan:
You were saying that you can’t really stop this if somebody were to, that is so true, especially at this age. So how can you raise some concerns in this letter, particularly the parent worries about the guy friendships. How can you raise those concerns without sounding very dismissive of the relationship?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
That is the key one. And do you remember this in college where you have a friend who’s a really good friend and then they start dating somebody and they’re gone. They’ve ghosted you. Do you remember going through that or being that person?

Reena Ninan:
Yeah. Oh yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It doesn’t always sit well with young people. I think they get it, but it’s also, it can be pretty offputting. And so I think there may be a little room in here for the folks to be like, you know what buddy? We know you’re really into this girl. You don’t want to be the guy who dumped his friends over a girlfriend. That’s not a good look. I think you could say something as much as that and he’ll grumble and that’s fine. But I think there are times in parenting where without any hopes that the kids immediately going to adopt our advice. We make general comments about how you treat people and I think that that’s a way you could kind of make a general comment. You don’t want to be that guy.

Reena Ninan:
Having the perspective of time that us parents have and knowing what happens with first intense relationships and the statistics of them lasting decades later, how do you deal with it over time? I mean, let’s be honest, college could very well be just around the corner where you’re probably likely not going to the same college. What’s your sense of that, Lisa?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
This gets at something I’ve seen over the years that is actually one of my least favorite things to see clinically. And when I read or hear a letter like this, I’m like, oof. When I think about it, if this is a slow moving car accident, how’s this going to crash? One thing I have seen if relationships like this continue and they do get to the brink of the end of high school and there is a question of who’s going where. There’s two things often at work. One is in heterosexual relationships, often the boy has enjoyed a closeness with the girl that he’s enjoyed with nobody else before. Girls using broad gender generalizations, girls in general are pretty intimate with each other. They share a lot. They talk about feelings. They do that. In my experience, when a boy starts dating a girl, especially in high school and especially when it’s this intense and powerful that is often one of his earliest or first experiences of having this tremendous emotional closeness.
So on balance, this is great, right? Because you want boys to have the kind of support that girls afford one another, but Reena, when it comes to what to do with a relationship or the decision, and you’re right, often around the college decision or things like it, they decide they’re not going to stay together because it’s impractical, it doesn’t work, so they wouldn’t have broken up otherwise, but it doesn’t make sense to stay together. What I have seen is the girl turns to all her friends and they support her and the boy back to that island analogy is by himself on an island because the one person he was really talking to about intimacy things or close feelings or intense feelings was his girlfriend. And so then what happens, and I’ve seen this enough, is that he keeps reaching out to her because she’s the support.

Reena Ninan:
Even after it’s over, you’re saying?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Even after it’s over, they decided not to be together, but he keeps reaching out to her. So then to make this slow moving car crash worse, and again, I don’t want people to be like, oh my gosh, my kids should never be in a relationship, but this is what I’ve seen over time. If he’s also, iced his friends that could exacerbate the situation.
I get why this parent sent this letter because even if they’re not in the letter articulating like, “What if this doesn’t last forever?” There’s enough in this letter to indicate, yeah, this could be pretty painful for this guy and maybe the girl who knows what’s going on with her friendships, who knows if this is her first intimate connection. I’m making gender generalizations, but parents worry about these things for exactly what you said. We know that a lot of these very rarely do these turn into lifelong relationships.

Reena Ninan:
You were mentioning earlier about how often you see in these relationship with teens, they’ll text each other in the morning when they wake up, text each other at night. Do you think there should be parameters around phone use when it gets this heated and it’s clearly affected other relationships?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I don’t know. I mean I think there should generally be parameters around phone use, not in bedrooms, things like that. And I think that’s true all through adolescence, as long as kids live in your house, which I know puts me how flexible I am about most things and this puts me on the sort of rigid end of something, which is pretty unusual. I do think that if this boy is either physically with the girl or digitally with the girl, which is what’s basically being described, there’s probably room to say, you know what? The phone does not come to the dinner table. The phone should not be present when your friends are around, you need to actually have other face-to-face interactions. It can’t all be her all the time and that may be some friction and that’s probably some friction worth having. And again, if the kid pushes back like, “This is what I want, you guys don’t like,” his folks can be like, “We have no problem with her. This is about basic respect and decency for the people who are in your presence and we’re going to ask that of you and you can be grumpy and we’re cool with that.”

Reena Ninan:
The one big overarching theme of our podcast that I’ve always felt and you’ve helped me understand is conversations, conversations, conversations. They don’t have to be lengthy diatribes, but at least talking about it because I had never thought of the impact a deep intense relationship would have on my other relationships and the perspective of time knowing those other relationships might actually be a touch more valuable or equally valuable than this very intense romance. So Lisa, you mentioned about heartbreak and how that can often happen in the high school years. What’s your advice for parents who are dealing with a very intense romance that ends suddenly in the teenage years?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Oh, this is just the worst. The good news is if a family’s already there, we have that episode that we did a while back about, “How Do I Support my Heartbroken Son?” And I’ve actually gotten some really nice dms to my Insta about that coming in handy for some folks. I think that what we want to remember is one of the number one rules about adolescents is that their feelings are more intense and they can readily lose perspective, especially when those feelings are really, really activated. So the kid whose heart is broken, that is going to feel so awful. And it’s back to what you were saying earlier, let’s not lose sight of how powerful this stuff is. Sometimes adults can be like, oh, it’s puppy love, or they’re just teenagers or you don’t really know what love is. That is not true and that is not helpful. That’s how you be dismissive, right? You’re asking about how do you not be dismissive? That’s how you be dismissive.
So we have to really honor the intensity of the pain that they’re in and also we have to hold for them the idea that they will be okay and they will get through this because it doesn’t feel like that to them. To them it feels like my heart is broken, it is unfixable. That was my one love I will never love again. And I think that that’s really where we say, I know this hurts so much and maybe we say I’ve been there, which usually teenagers don’t want to hear, but you will get through this and what kind of ice cream would you like and should we go find the puppy and should we, you do all of the comforting you just love on them because it really is hard and I actually have found, clinically, it’s harder now because their whole day becomes a vacuum of where that person used to be. When we were in high school we were hanging out with our friends because we couldn’t hang out with our partner all the time or we couldn’t talk to them at night or whatever. Now it is a massive cavity in their life because of the digital connection that kids have with each other.

Reena Ninan:
That’s a great point. It’s a great point to remind parents about. What do you think the biggest mistake is that parents make when responding to a really intense relationship like this?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think the biggest, maybe easiest mistake to make would be trying to step in, having this sort of midlife knowledge, having our awareness of I love my son or I love my kid and I see a very painful heartbreak coming down the line. He is dumping his friends, he’s all day all the time with her. This isn’t going to last forever. I want to try to do something now to head that off at the pass. So I’m going to say to him, “You know what? Maybe you should be hanging out with your friends more. Why are you hanging out with her all the time?” Or maybe I’m going to try to get in there and change things. Super well-meaning. Totally understandable. The nature of any teenager around anything is the second an adult is like, I’m going to try to make you do something different than you’re doing. By a reflex, they’re like, I’m going to hold tighter to the thing I have. And that’s before we even get to the thing that this guy has is a girl he is mad about. It is so Romeo and Juliet, it is. So the harder you work to keep them away from each other, the more they’re going to drive towards each other.

Reena Ninan:
Great example. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s so hard. So I think I’m so grateful that the parent wrote us, we’re like these random ladies that they don’t know and it’s like takes it away from family life. It’s just going to be a lot of what is fair to ask of this kid? “You know what? We want you at dinner. You know what? Don’t be rude to your friends.” But I think a lot of the worries the parent may have, they’re going to have to tell somebody else, I don’t think it’s going to work. There’s not going to be any good outcome from airing all of these to the boy.

Reena Ninan:
When you look at a situation like this that we looked at some of the common mistakes that parents make, but is there anything else when you step back that in your counseling, in relationships and family relationships that you wish you could arm parents with as they go in and are dealing with this?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, it’s interesting. I think about, it’s funny how much mileage we’re getting out of it. I think about our episode about fan fiction.

Reena Ninan:
Oh yeah, a couple of weeks ago.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Romantic development is part of healthy development. Sexual development is part of healthy development. So I think as soon as we get to kids and teenagers and romance and of course given the intensity of this relationship, the parents are like, oh my gosh, are they having sex? Right? I mean all of these things are going to be on a parent’s mind. I think we come at it so readily from a perspective of this is risky, this is dangerous. How do I stop it? The more we can always have that frame around it of like this is actually part of healthy and natural and positive development, the better. And then Reena, I’ll tell you something else. This sounds like a nice relationship. It sounds like they treat each other well. It’s definitely big and it’s definitely crowding out other things and that’s not not an issue. I am always so happy when that’s how kids first start their romantic lives with something kind, something mutual, something tender.
Even if it doesn’t last. If these two treat each other well, they’re both learning what relationships really should feel like. I will take that any day over a kid’s initiation into the romantic world being a relationship that feels unkind or coercive or unhealthy, often also super intense. Then you have two problems. One is they’re getting hurt. They’re going to get hurt more as this thing goes on, and the other is you actually have to help them walk back and understand that’s not what relationships should look like. You should be looking for something else. So at least these kids are laying down a template of this feels good and we are good to each other. This is what I’m going to be looking for down the line too.

Reena Ninan:
I’m laughing because I’m not sure if your advice is for teens or for people married for many, many decades. I could also use that same reminder of how kindness shows up.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
This is how relationships should be, this is how we should be treating one another. There’s just no question about it.

Reena Ninan:
Married or divorced. I think that you have helped us understand that.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Absolutely.

Reena Ninan:
So Lisa, what do you have for us for Parenting to Go?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I can’t believe this has never come up, but I’m so glad I can bring it up now. Reena, so much of good parenting is in biting one’s tongue. So much of doing a good job as a parent is in what you don’t say, and I don’t feel like we get credit for it. When you keep your mouth shut, there’s not a lot of credit to be had. It’s really hard. It’s really frustrating. But I think this is the perfect letter to say that on of so much of getting it right in family life is not saying the thing you really sometimes want to say.

Reena Ninan:
Hard to do, very hard to do. Well, thank you Lisa, and next week. This is a tough topic, but a topic. I’m so thrilled that we are taking on Teen Depression and Suicide in the Year 2026. What do we need to know? We have a fabulous guest who has been a friend of the pod for a long time and come on before Dr. Jonathan Singer, so he’ll join us next week with a little bit of an update and what we need to think about on this topic. I’ll see you next week.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’ll see you next week.