A Heart-Warming Moment too Much to Handle?

It’s that time of year, and this morning I had the priviledge of watching a cutesy prom-date request done right. The suitor arrived at the school at the crack of dawn, and using paper cups, wrote out “PROM?” on the chain-link fence where the date-to-be parks every morning. The astonished-but-elated date agreed on the spot, and signed the deal with a romantic kiss.

I feel it is certainly important to treasure the small things in life, such as an “aw” moment, or maybe just a damn good slice of pizza. Who knows what the rest of your day will be like, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a fall-back thought to smile at. I can recall another touching story, an elaborate plan pulled off to perfection. The suitor just so happened to work in the office, and enlisted the security personnel of the school to help him. The date was busy in class when stern-faced security and our beloved policeman, Witherspoon, confronted her and escorted her to the security office. She must have been terrified, but the “frown turned upside down” when instead of being met with a citation, she opened the door to her suitor bearing roses and a request. However, this subject matter also bears more serious questions. Instead of prompting a heart-felt “dawww”, the minds of some may jump to a more sinister side of prom and the question: “are teens responsible enough?”

It doesn’t take much searching to come across horror stories of prom-plans gone wrong (and no, not the ones in the movies). It seems to be every year that headlines about alcohol poisoning and drunken driving deaths claw their way to the front page. Others are less disastrous but represent serious social problems nonetheless: teen pregnancy, drug abuse, and various other issues. It is these headlines and stories that influence the attitudes of adults on the subject of teen responsibility and prompt doubts that teens do not have to capacity to handle the responsibility.

So, what does the editorialist-yours-truly have to say on this point? Some of the more sinister issues are best left for another day, but I would like to discuss teens and their relationships. Certainly, teens have the capacity for romance and “love”, but on the subject of relationships, I believe a line must be drawn somewhere: specifically one between romance and life decisions such as marriage. Science has found that teenagers react more with their emotional centers than adults; if any cause for the relatively widely-accepted  concept that adults are more “mature” than teens can be identified, that is the reason. This discovery carries implications that pertain to two different sides of the street. On one side, adults must admit that teenagers have the same (if not greater) capacity to feel emotions like those generalized by the term love, and teen relationships should be valued just as much as those of adults. This is where I draw the line down the street: these relationships should be valued, but not legitimized in the same way as adults. I refer, of course, to marriage, which in all reality is a very serious proposal that carries many life implications. The love-struck teens may see matrimony as the only way to adeptly express their feelings for one another, and due to the heightened emotional capacity of teens this may very well be true. What many teens do not see, however, is that emotions are a realm fraught with extremes. “Love is blind”, the saying goes, and the mad love of teens may very well obscure the precarious nature of their own emotions. Add marriage to this equation where anything can happen, teens run the risk of placing all their eggs (opportunities) in a plane (metaphorically speaking) that has a nasty habit of  crashing and burning. Thus, in conclusion, however sincere the love, teens should be highly discouraged from early marriage.