Young Love

By Tiffany Sharples

There's a very thin line between being thrilled and being terrified, and Candice Feiring saw both emotions on her son's face. The sixth-grader had just gotten off the phone with a girl in his class who called to ask if he'd like to go to the movies--just the two of them. It sounded a whole lot like a date to him. "Don't I have something to do tomorrow?" he asked his mother. A psychologist and an editor of The Development of Romantic Relationships in Adolescence, Feiring was uniquely prepared to field that question and give her son the answer that, for now, he needed. "I think you're too young to go out one-on-one," she said. His face broke into a relieved grin.

A year later, even a month later, Feiring's adolescent son might have reacted very differently to being told he was not ready to date. That moment-to-moment mutability of his interest in--never mind his readiness for--courtship is only one tiny part of the exhilarating, exhausting, confounding path all humans travel as they make their halting way into the world of love. From the moment we're born--when the world is mostly sensation, and nothing much matters beyond a full belly, a warm embrace and a clean diaper--until we finally emerge into adulthood and understand the rich mix of tactile, sexual and emotional experiences that come with loving another adult, we are in a constant state of learning and rehearsing. Along with language, romance may be one of the hardest skills we'll ever be called on to acquire. But while we're more or less fluent in speech by the time we're 5, romance takes a lot longer. Most Western romance research involves Western cultures, where things may move at a very different pace from that of, say, the Far East or the Muslim world. While not all of the studies yield universal truths, they all suggest that people are wired to pick up their love skills in very specific stages.

Infancy and Babyhood

Babies may not have much to do right after they're born, but the stakes are vitally high that they do it right. One of the first skills newborns must learn is how to woo the adults in their world. "For a baby, literally you're going to be dead without love, so getting people around you to love you is a really good strategy," says Alison Gopnik, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Babies do this much the way adults do: by flirting. Within a couple of months, infants may move and coo, bob and blink in concert with anyone who's paying attention to them. Smiling is a critical and cleverly timed part of this phase. Babies usually manage a first smile by the time they're 6 weeks old, which, coincidentally or not, is about the time the novelty of a newborn has worn off and sleep-deprived parents are craving some peace. A smile can be a powerful way to win them back.

Even before we know how to turn on the charm, touch and chemistry are bonding us firmly to our parents--and bonding them to us. Oxytocin--a hormone sometimes called the cuddle chemical--surges in new mothers and, to a lesser extent, in new fathers, making their baby instantly irresistible to them. One thing grownups particularly can't resist doing is picking a baby up, and that too is a key to survival. "Babies need physical contact with human hands to grow and thrive," says Lisa Diamond, a psychologist at the University of Utah. Years of data have shown that premature babies who are regularly touched fare much better than those who aren't.

As babies seduce and adults respond, a sophisticated dynamic develops. Mothers learn to synch their behavior with their newborn's, so that they offer a smile when their baby smiles, food when their baby's hungry. That's a pleasingly reciprocal deal, and while adults are already aware that when you give pleasure and comfort, you get it in return, it's news for the baby. "Babies are building up ideas about how close relationships work," says Gopnik.

Toddlerhood and Preschool

When kids reach 2, mom and dad aren't paying quite the same attention they used to. You feed yourself, you play on your own, you get held less often. That's not to say you need your parents less--and you're not shy about letting them know it. Children from ages 2 to 5 have yet to develop what's known as a theory of mind--the understanding that other people have hidden thoughts that are different from yours and that you can conceal your thoughts too. Without that knowledge, kids conceal nothing. "They love you," says Gopnik, "and they really, really express it."

At the same time, kids are learning something about sensual pleasures. They explore their bodies more, discovering that certain areas yield more electrifying feelings than others. This simultaneous emotional development and physical experience can lead to surprising behavior. "Three- and 4-year-olds are very sexual beings," says Gopnik, "and a lot of that is directed at their parents." Some of this can get generalized to other adults too, as when a small child develops a crush on a teacher or seems to flirt with an aunt or uncle. While a number of things are at work when this happens, the most important is playacting and the valuable rehearsal for later life it provides. "Kids are trying to play out a set of roles and be more like adults," says psychologist Andrew Collins of the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development.

The same kind of training behavior can show up with playmates and friends, often accompanied by unexpectedly powerful feelings. Social psychologist Elaine Hatfield of the University of Hawaii is best known for co-creating the Passionate Love Scale, a questionnaire with which she can gauge feelings of romantic connectedness in adults. She has modified the test to elicit similar information from children. In early work, she studied 114 boys and 122 girls, some as young as 4, presenting them with statements like "I am always thinking about _____" or "I would rather be with _____ than anybody else." The kids filled in the name of someone they loved, and Hatfield asked them to rate the intensity of feelings with stacks of checkers: the higher the stack, the more they felt. In some instances, the kids became overwhelmed with emotion, as in the case of a 5-year-old girl who wept at the thought of a boy she would never see again. "Little kids fall in love too," Hatfield says plainly.

School Age and Puberty

As with so much else in childhood, things get more complicated once kids reach the social incubator of elementary school. Nowhere near sexually mature, they nonetheless become sexually active--in their own fashion. The opposite-sex teasing and chasing that are rife on playgrounds may give teachers headaches, but they teach boys and girls a lot. The games, after all, are about pursuit and emotional arousal, two critical elements of sex. "There are a lot of erotic forms of play," says Barrie Thorne, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Gender Play: Boys and Girls in School. "It can be titillating, and it may involve sexual meaning, but it comes and goes."

More enduring--for a while at least-- is the gender segregation that begins at this age. Boys and girls who once played in mixed groups at school begin to drift apart into single-sex camps, drawing social boundaries that will stay in place for years. In her 1986 study that is still cited today, Thorne looked at 802 elementary-school students from California and Massachusetts to determine just what goes on behind these gender fortifications and why they're established in the first place.

To no one's surprise, both groups spend a lot of time talking and thinking about the opposite sex, but they do it in very different ways. Boys experiment more with sexually explicit vocabulary and, later, sexual fantasies. Girls focus more heavily--but hardly exclusively--on romantic fantasies. The two-gender world they'll eventually re-enter will be a lot more complex than that, but for now, the boys are simply practicing being boys--albeit in a very rudimentary way--and the girls are practicing being girls. "Among the boys, for example, there's a lot of bragging talk," says Thorne. "You're supposed to be powerful and not vulnerable."

When puberty hits, the wall between the worlds begins to crumble--a bit. Surging hormones make the opposite sex irresistible, but the rapprochement happens collectively, with single-gender groups beginning to merge into co-ed social circles within which individual boys and girls can flirt and experiment. Generally, kids who pair off with a love interest and begin dating will hold onto a return ticket to the mixed-gender group. Jennifer Connolly, a psychologist at York University in Toronto, studied 174 high school students in grades nine to 11 and found that when things go awry with couples, the kids are quickly absorbed back into the co-ed circle, with the old single-sex group increasingly eclipsed. "Once the progression has started," Connolly says, "we don't see kids retreating back into only same-gender interaction."

Almost all of these early relationships are, not surprisingly, short-lived--and a good thing too. If the purpose is to pick a mate for life, you're hardly likely to find a suitable one on your very first go. What's more, even if you did get lucky, you'd almost certainly not have the emotional wherewithal to keep the relationship going. Adults often lament the love they had and lost in high school and wonder what would have happened if they had met just a few years later. But the only way to acquire the skills to conduct a lifetime relationship is to practice on ones you may destroy in the process. "Kids don't really have a sense of working to preserve a relationship," Connolly says. "Adolescence is a time for experimentation."

Sexual experimentation is a big part of that--and it's a part that's especially fraught. Pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are just two of the things that make sex perilous. There are also emotional conflicts kids bring into their early experiences with intimacy. Psychologists have long warned that children who grow up in a hostile home or one in which warmth is withheld are likelier to start having sex earlier and engage in it more frequently. In a study that will be published in March, Trish Williams, a neuropsychology fellow at Alberta Children's Hospital, studied a group of 1,959 kids ages 11 to 13 and did find a striking correlation between a volatile home and earlier sexual behavior. A few of the children had had intercourse at as young an age as 12, and while the number of sexually active kids wasn't high--just 2% of the total--the cause was clear. "Hostile parenting is highly associated with problem behavior," says Williams.

Even kids without such emotional scarring can be pretty undiscriminating in their sexual choices. Two studies conducted by sociologist Wendy Manning in 2005 and 2006 showed that while 75% of kids have their first sexual experience with a partner they're dating--a figure that may bring at least some comfort to worried parents--more than 60% will eventually have sex with someone with whom they're not in any kind of meaningful dating relationship. Hooking up--very informal sex between two people with no intent of pursuing a deeper relationship--takes this casualness even further. A 2004 study Manning worked on showed that the overwhelming majority of hookups involve alcohol use--an impairer of sexual judgment if ever there was one--and according to the work of other researchers, more than half the times kids hook up, they do not use a condom. Manning's studies suggest that hooking up prevents kids from practicing the interpersonal skills they'll need in a permanent relationship and may lead to lowered expectations of what those relationships should be like--and a greater willingness to settle for less.

For all these perils, the fact is, most people manage to shake off even such high-stakes behavior and find a satisfying life partner, and that says something about the resilience of humans as romantic creatures. In the U.S., by the time we're 18, about 80% of us have had at least one meaningful romantic relationship. As adults, up to 75% of us marry. Certainly, nature doesn't make things easy. From babyhood on, it equips us with the tools we'll need for the hardest social role we'll ever play--the role of romantic--and then chooses the moment when we're drunk on the hormones of adolescence and least confident in ourselves to push us on stage to perform. That we go on at all is a mark of our courage. That we learn the part so well is a mark of how much is at stake.

With reporting by With Reporting by Kristin Kloberdanz / Modesto, Calif.