<p>Like I have posted on the first page of this thread, “he does not feel hurt by this any more by now. I actually do not care much.” I only wonder why my generation handles the similar transition with more difficulties in general.</p>
<p>I would love it if he could find “the one” soon and they could eventually live “happily after” by themselves and we as parents do not need to know or worry anything about them at all. It may become that way soon or later. This is because, more likely than not, we will live on the opposite coasts (now and in the future also.) Due to the great distance between us, we won’t know that much about him or her when he has his own family. We really appreciate that he came home so frequently during his college years (every break in 4 years except for the last one.) Actually, I only saw him in person one time per year, for the past two years!</p>
<p>I would imagine that the parenting issue here is not as “serious” as the one on a recent Parent Forum thread: “mom refusing me to go to a college two hours away”. At least we gladly let him go thousands of miles away for college after high school.</p>
<p>There is a line not to cross as a parent, and obsessing about a child’s relationship is not healthy, but that isn’t necessarily what’s going on here. If the OP can be a supportive presence for her kids and they choose to ask her advice, then that could be a good thing.
I try to be available to my kids if they ask me for advice, but sometimes I am stumped by the new vocabulary and dating norms. Much of my vocabulary (including the word “dating”) is outdated. Sometimes we parents need an update on what’s going on, like this thread.</p>
<p>mCat,
I only met my son-in-law once before he and my daughter married two years ago. It IS a weird feeling to know that your “child” is committing his/her life to a stranger, and not being very connected to his/her daily life.
I see my daughter less often than you see your son, as she lives in Alaska and I am underemployed on the east coast. But we do our best to maintain a relationship. She and her husband came home last summer, and I took note of some of his favorite treats, and made a point of including them in the care package I sent at Christmas. They are 2 1/2 hours by plane from the nearest grocery store so treats are a rarity. I was happy to see that on his facebook page he said “my mother-in-law must love me”. She just had her birthday, and I included licorice for him along with her gifts (then again, I also sent sunflower seeds for her gerbils).
You can only do what you can do, and hope for the best. What will really be painful is when they decide to have children. My grandmother was my favorite person in the entire world, and I will miss having that relationship with my grandchildren.</p>
<p>What happened was that DS needed a “sounding board” when he was “troubled” by this during the winter break. I believe that if he were on campus, he would rather consult with his friends – but he did not have any friend in the city we live because we just moved to this city not long ago.</p>
<p>Granted, if he has not been very close to us (at least to one of the parents), he may not consult with us at all in the first place.</p>
<p>In one morning, he learned something about her from what she had posted (do not want to go to the details here) and became upset for hours. Finally he decided to invite one of the parents to take a walk with him and this was how we learned what was troubling him. It is definitely not that we went to him for this “talk”; it was him who came to us. We were also very careful about NOT providing him any unsolicited advice. (They may resolve the conflict by themselves and we do not want to be the “bad guys” if this happens.)</p>
<p>We basically served as the persons to whom he could “vent” so he felt better afterwards. But it did affect me emotionally so I came here mostly to vent also.</p>
<p>Now that he is far away again and has his circle of friends to support him, we no longer serve this role. We believe he will handle it properly from now on by himself while he is there around his friends. I think that by now, he may even have “normal/non-emotional” interaction with her. It is good for both of them in this way. This is because they can hardly avoid running into each other occasionally due to their living arrangement on campus.</p>
<p>We usually have one call in a week. Occasionally, even this one-call-per-week is skipped if he is busy. We almost never have two calls in a week unless something urgent comes up. This is the “communication pattern” we have established since his freshman year in college. Hopefully, we could keep this in the future as well.</p>
<p>The thing we learned from our experiences with S1…he often needed to vent, and we were a safe place to do so. More importantly, when he called back in a few weeks, we’d inquire about the issue, and more oft than not it had long been resolved. We parents hold on to the hurts and concerns wayyyy longer than our young adults do. They’ve usually moved on. Then again, it’s nice to know that they feel good about using us as sounding boards once in awhile.</p>
<p>Regarding: “We were the safe place to do so”, this reminds me that it happened at least 3 times in the past that he called us to chat in the middle of night just because he had a big trouble in getting into sleep before a big event. He was fully aware that we would not mind being waken up under this exceptional circumstance. This would happen when he was on the road (i.e., staying at a hotel) or before a “big” test (usually when he thought he had not sufficiently prepared for the test.) I think he gets my “bad genes”: whenever there is something in the mind, I (he as well) will have a hard time in getting into sleep.</p>
<p>BTW, since this is CC, it may be fitting to mention this point. When a “child” (well, a young adult child) is in an academic environment where there is a high concentration of hyper-competitive students, depending on the personality of the individual, he could be under a high pressure - often unnecessarily. It may be especially true if he happens to be “the glass is always half empty (rather than half full)” kind of person. For some individual, this is a downside of going to such a place - whether it is a high school, college, or beyond. (I think DS has been at three of these. We thus need to remind him that as long as he gets out, no need to get out with a flying color, it is totally good enough. Well, he had got out of two of these with a flying color, but likely with a lot of sweats and pain, I think.)</p>
<p>An example is that when he thinks the majority of students study, say, 12 hours, but he “only” studies 10 hours, he would feel insufficiently prepared for a test, even though in the end this may not be the case after all.</p>
<p>I think a lot may depend on how the relationship ends. If there’s drama and bad blood at the end (i.e., if there is an unwilling “dumpee”), it may be harder to go back to a casual friendly relationship.</p>
<p>It could also take a long period of time for some to emotionally recover even from a mutually agreeable breakup for it to become/go back to being a friendship. </p>
<p>And that’s assuming genuine friendship is what’s really desired/striven for by both parties. Far too often, when one of the ex-es say they “want to be friends”, it really means either “lets not be enemies”, “lets be casual acquaintances at best”, or a sugar-coated way of communicating that one doesn’t ever want to see him/her ever again. It’s something which has driven many heated FB discussions among FB friends and acquaintances over the last few years as “friendzoning” has become written about in the popular media. </p>
<p>I think there was no particularly bad blood at the end. It was as if one side “hinted”, the other side “got it” and decided to stop the relationship. One side (likely) intentionally let the other side know via FB that “I have other suitor or suitors”. The other side thought that "since I am not that “valued” by you, there is no way any good relationship can grow out of this. In other word, he was not willing to stick around any more in such an ambiguous situation, waiting for her to eventually decide which one is for her to keep. He is not the clingy type who would stick around, risking the possibility of getting involved in a drama (I.e., more than one men and one woman.)</p>
<p>I think that, N years ago, his previous relationship was ended without bad blood also (The main reason was likely just the long distance.) But for that breakup, she did not mention any other potential suitor like this one.</p>
<p>I don’t find it weird to stay friends with your ex, especially if your worlds are fairly entwined (which seems to be the case here). If it is a long relationship, your worlds will have become entwined even if they weren’t originally. In a short one, I do think it is atypical to stay friends with an ex who you met online or at a random party and otherwise isn’t part of your social group. But if you are talking about someone who is in your social orbit apart from the relationship, unless it ends on bad terms, I think that’s just ordinary. </p>
<p>What I do find odd is this talk of passive-aggressive hinting and “getting the message.”. After a date or two, I don’t see any need to formally end things, but after six weeks, it would seem to me that both parties should have been clearer. I don’t know what was going on in the girl’s head, but if I were your son, I would have just said “Hey, where do you see this relationship going?” rather than playing guessing games. If I remember your previous thread, the girl’s behavior, as you described it, did seem odd (can’t remember the specifics), but when you’ve been dating for such a brief period, it seems to me asking “are you interested in an exclusive relationship/might you become so” is a more reasonable approach then “I can’t believe you’ve been dating another guy - clearly we aren’t on the same page.” </p>
<p>apprenticeprof, This was exactly what he asked her after their relationship had become more and more serious (i.e., more like a BF/GF couple than just a casual date.) But the reply he got was that she does not know what she wants and she insists on keeping “looking around” for other potential dating candidates (and actually did find yet-another-one and posted his picture on FB in a few days they were not together during a short holiday break.) He then convinced himself that she really does not care much for him and there is no point for this to continue.</p>
<p>I think she has every right to keeping pursuing the next love interest (he was likely her number 6 in that year alone), but he also has every right to not wanting to spend his time and energy on this any more. After he had calmed down, he was joking that after he had spent about a hundred dollars on dating her, he got a “sister” unexpectedly in the end. Hopefully, this “sister” will not bother him too much about her dating life in the future. He had heard more than enough about her exes (there were many) before he himself became her ex.</p>
<p>Seems like a good call on his part, then. Most relationships don’t work out. With the exception of her being so open about flaunting all of her other dates - if that is what she was doing - this, too seems like a pretty typical sequence of events: the partners quickly realized they weren’t looking for the same things and ended it. It was probably good experience for your son anyway.</p>
<p>I agree with you that it was a good experience for him.</p>
<p>About the flaunting part, she could barely stop talking about it (could last for more than an hour in one way talking without expecting any response) when they were on a date. She did not talk about them in any critical way, more along the line of how nice each of them treated her. This includes one who “almost married her” even though both of them were just college students then. He thinks that, strangely, for two of them who she had been more involved with for a much longer time, she actually did not want to talk about them (maybe more hurtful for her to talk about these two whom she really had had more feelings about? I guess DS may be one of them she would have no problem
In talking about with her future BF – that dude who refused to get intimate before becoming exclusive with each other. LOL.)</p>
<p>After he had reflected on this, he said that, in the future, he might be more interested in paying attention to some girl who may be on the quiet, shy and “less noticeable” side. His theory is that such a girl may observe more quietly. But she would give more thoughts before starting a relationship. If he succeeds in getting together with such a relatively shy/quiet girl, the success rate may be higher as both may have given this relationship more thoughts before they decide to get into it. A somewhat strange theory.</p>
<p>After their mutually agreed breakup, when she had some trouble, she would occasionally come to DS for some help (in the context of being “just a friend” only.) This may be why DS once used the word “sibling” to describe how they interact with each other now.</p>
<p>She ran into a trouble recently because one of her two potential BFs became very angry at her and was saying something unpleasant to her because of the other boy she had been involved with (likely for an even longer time) simultaneously. Maybe he is not as “nice” as DS as DS just walked away from this relationship without any argument. If not handled properly, dating multiple people at the same time could be messy when one of candidates is misled, or some of them are just nasty people. When dating with so many people, this may happen. She said her loving parents are constantly worried about her. She may badly need more close female friends who she could consult with about the management of her occasionally complicated multi-way relationship, than potential boyfriends - This is because she tends to be not lack of the latter at all.</p>
<p>Asking for help on relationship matters from someone one broke up with not long ago seems a bit too much like a “friend” who only contacts you if he/she needs to ask for an imposition-ary favor. In short, someone who is acting as a “user” and not a genuine friend. </p>
<p>I failed to make it clear, The “help” she was seeking was not about her other relationship. She genuinely needed his help of other nature one night so she called him but he missed the call as he went to bed early. He returned her call the next day and checked on her after work next evening.</p>
<p>Isn’t it somewhat strange that she kind of “broke” his heart back then (she likely knew it) but she would still call him?! She likely thinks he is at least good enough as a friend to keep around.</p>
<p>Because of this encounter, she mentioned her new relationship troubles which DS really has no interests in listening (he heard enough of it when he was still her date) and is not capable of “helping”. He himself is scared of this kind of drama so he gets out. I believe he thinks she is immature and it would take some time before she is willing to “grow up.”</p>
<p>She is just his acquaintance or a friend at best, not his love as of today. He is no longer hurt; this is all I care about.</p>
<p>Yeah, it is more useful for me to focus on the tedious task of tax return, FAFSA, etc…For the latter, two additional years to suffer in my whole life. It will take me some time to sort out this huge pile of records (and the complicated tax code and tax application software.)</p>