There is something attractive about young love, which is why it is celebrated so prominently in novels and movies. The love relationship seems so important, so earnest, and so passionate at the time, and yet so innocent and bittersweet in retrospect. Why are the dips and rises of our loves so important to us in adolescence? Adolescent love is to adult love what a child’s play is to adult work: it teaches us how to react to love, to manage our emotions, and to handle the pain of love. It also lays the groundwork for adult intimacy. Adolescents must learn to establish a strong personal identity separate from their family. Experimentation with different approaches to others is very natural; and, during adolescence, we develop the role repertoire that follows us into adulthood. Similarly, we experiment with different intimacy styles (J. Johnson & Alford, 1987) and develop an intimacy repertoire, a set of behaviors that we use to forge close relationships throughout our lives.
The process of establishing our repertoires can be a difficult task. This helps explain why adolescent relationships can be so intense and fraught with jealousy and why adolescents often are unable to see beyond the relationship (J. Johnson & Alford, 1987). Our first relationships often take the form of a “crush” or infatuation and are often directed toward unattainable partners such as teachers or movie stars. Male movie stars provide adolescent girls with a safe outlet for developing romantic love before dating and sexual activity begin (Karniol, 2001).
Sometimes the first lessons of love are painful, as we learn that love may not be returned, that feelings of passion fade, that love itself does not preclude conflict. Yet managing such feelings helps us develop a mature love style. Many factors have been found to be associated with the ability to find romantic love in adolescence, such as marital status of the parents, the quality of the parental relationship, and comfort with one’s body (Seiffge-Krenke et al., 2001). In fact, as we discussed earlier, difficulties with attachments in college students’ intimate relationships are often caused by poor attachments to one’s parents (see the Sex Talk question on page 190 ).
The emotions of adolescent love are so powerful that adolescents may think that they are the only ones to have gone through such joy, pain, and confusion. They may gain some comfort in knowing that almost everyone goes through the same process to some degree. Confusion about love certainly does not end with adolescence.
Question: Someone told me I’m attracted to my boyfriend because of how he smells. That sounds completely crazy. Is there any truth to this idea?
Although controversial, there may be some truth to it (Baum, 2004). We register the "smells" of people through their pheromones (FAIR — oh-moans)—odorless chemicals secreted by both humans and animals (Rodriguez, 2004; Thorne & Amrein, 2003). Pheromones have been found to influence attraction, mating, and bonding (Wright, 1994), and have also been found to promote the bond between a mother and her infant (Kohl & Francoeur, 2002). You might remember that we talked about the influence of pheromones in Chapter 4 when we discussed menstrual synchronicity (Hays, 2003; see page 118).
As for how pheromones influence our mate choice, it may be that our odor preferences are influenced by our major histocompatibility complex (MHC; Santos et al., 2005). The MHC is a group of genes that helps the body recognize invaders such as bacteria and viruses. Because humans are protected by the broadest array of disease resistance, we may be programmed to mate with a partner whose MHC differs from our own (Milinski & Wedekind, 2001). This way, any offspring have a more complete MHC. In one study, women were given several soiled T-shirts from a variety of men and asked which scents they preferred. The women preferred the T-shirts with odors from men who had different MHC systems (Milinski & Wedekind, 2001). This doesn’t mean that we can’t bond and mate with someone whose smell we dislike. Over time, we adjust to these smells and can learn to love them.