Dear Rick 5 – High School Girlfriend 2
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
December 2, 2016
Scott: What else – on getting a girlfriend?
Rick: There’s a semi-creepy or fully creepy pickup artist movement. Guys work with each other to try to develop techniques for picking up girls. There’s a lot that’s creepy about that. It is manipulative. It objectifies girls. It has girls as targets that often don’t acknowledge women as complete people, but as people as targets to have sex with.
The less creepy and more responsible aspects of that whole thing have a couple reasonable principles. One is be somebody worthy of having a girlfriend, ‘become your own best self’ to put it in Oprah terms. If you’re gross, if you’re angry, you’re probably turning off people and instead you might want to put some effort into improving yourself.
You might want to put effort into being a person that people might like being with. Another aspect is to think or try to understand women as complete people. Understand that every person has his or her own objectives and feelings and see if there’s a way that you can come across as a person who has consideration for those feelings and wants.
Those are feelings and wants on the part of other people. Part of having a long-term partner or even a medium term partner is fitting your needs together with their needs. It takes a while. Most people in high school are more sophisticated and less isolated now thanks to everything than they used to be.
But it still takes a while for people, for teenagers, to get a good handle on what it might entail to be in a relationship, or even adults. My wife and I have been in couples counselling for well over fifteen years. It’s not like we go in there every week to yell at each other.
We go in every 3 or 4 weeks to discuss stuff that might be better discussed in a refereed environment. A big part of couple’s work is adjusting expectations. People can change to some extent, but what also has to change are if people have unreasonable expectations for their partners.
Couples counselling is a good way to diplomatically get gripes like that out without everything necessarily turning into a fight.
Author(s)
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
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Rick Rosner 