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AS A LOT of parents do for a time, my wife and I had a curfew for our sons. They had to be home by midnight—with one exception: if they were helping a date get home safely.
There were a few occasions when one of my boys would come home and say, “Look, I know I’m past curfew, but I was taking her home.” I couldn’t confirm these stories, and my sons could have been snowing me, but I wanted to give them guidance around dating that wasn’t based in “don’t” and “no.” This is largely because dating is so much more complicated for my boys than it was for me.
Texts and direct messages are their foundation of communication. The right (or wrong) emoji makes a difference. The nuances of what’s said, unsaid, and never texted back can be crushingly complicated.
So for me to give my boys a long list of “don’t do this” and “don’t say that” would feel not only like I was further pressuring them, but also like I was completely out of my element.
It’s not as if my sons and I have never had the sex-mechanics talk, or the consent talk, or the consequences-of-unprotected-sex talk. Those are important talks to have. But they are rooted in don’ts. And where does that leave the dos? If I framed dating around the negative, what would my sons have felt about their desires, about flirtation, about all the truly wonderful parts of dating?
Yes, dating is a learned skill. There’s risk. There’s rejection. But then there’s reward and acceptance—and at times, mystifyingly, love. If I were to tell my sons what not to do and leave it at that, I feel I would be stifling their ability to grow and relate.
I guess you could call our family’s curfew exception permissive. But the alternative is restriction, which pushes sex and dating into that void of “things we don’t talk about.” I prefer to think of the rule as akin to the modern version of chivalry: respect and courtesy.
I remember one night when one of my sons broke curfew. He was maybe 30 minutes late. I was still awake. I watched him shuffle into the house soaking wet. He told me he had walked his date home, in the rain, across town. I offered him some tea. He went to change.
He was damp. I was proud.
A version of this article originally appeared in the May/June 2023 issue of Men’s Health.
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