With the exception of a few polite greetings, I have never personally interacted with Philip’s peer, Ophelia. But I have interacted a lot with Ophelia’s mother. Ophelia’s mother is part of my extended network of proactive parents in the greater Hermes area. Among those she trusts, Ophelia’s mother openly discloses Ophelia’s basic struggles on both a short-term and long-term basis and occasionally provides specific details.
Ophelia is a warm, talented teenager who is now in her Junior Year at Conquistador High School. She has a tight circle of loyal friends of both genders from Conquistador as well as other schools. She is generally liked by her wider network of acquaintances, including Philip. But Ophelia struggles much more than the average teen because her natural aptitude for coping is handicapped.
Proactive parents like Ophelia’s mother and I know too many vocabulary words and acronyms that have been coined by the mental health profession. Bipolar, OCD, ADHD, and Asperger’s are just a few. At this point, if a teen does not have one of these labels, he or she probably has a close friend who does.
Despite Ophelia’s reduced aptitude for coping, she has found help in coping through friends and through boyfriends. Her mother is particularly happy with the loyalty and closeness Ophelia enjoys with her friends. Her mother also likes the fact that boys find Ophelia attractive. But the boyfriends scare Ophelia’s mother and I can understand why. There always seems to be a new boyfriend not long after the relationship with the previous boyfriend has ended. Ophelia is pretty but not stunning. Given her extra load of emotional baggage, I wondered why Ophelia attracted boyfriends so easily. But it only took a few minutes of observation to come to my own conclusions.
On one particular afternoon, I went to pick up Philip at the end of a teen event. I parked and waited patiently. Philip was lingering inside the building talking with friends and I decided not to text him. Outside the building, Ophelia and a teenage boy were talking, sitting close on two benches placed at right angles to one another. From the inside of my car with the windows rolled up, it was like watching a silent movie. Ophelia was almost facing my direction, while the boy mostly had his back turned to me. I could see Ophelia’s face and the body language of both of them. Ophelia was leaning forward. Her eyes were wide and the muscles in her face were relaxed. Her mouth was slightly open when she wasn’t speaking. When she was speaking, she spoke each word slowly. Like a silent movie from a century ago, the facial expressions and body language seemed amplified to compensate for the lack of sound. But the two were not acting, of course. This was a real interaction. Ophelia was pouring out her heart to the teenage boy. He was listening intently and she was clinging tightly to his attention, soaking in his moral support.
While I did not know the nature of the conversation, it looked intensely adult. The sight reminded me of the kinds of conversations Amelia and I had in our early twenties when we were talking about getting married. Hopes, dreams, fears and shortcomings were shared transparently. But I knew Ophelia’s words to the teenage boy were not so deep. Certainly she was disclosing her love for him and longing for him to validate her and reciprocate that love. They stood and embraced. Her half of the embrace was particularly warm and vulnerable. They held hands and walked back inside the building shortly before Philip came out.
Ophelia and the teenage boy were not talking about marriage or exploring what life would be like decades into the future. It was something much more mundane. But for Ophelia, the stakes felt just as high if not higher. The boy’s validation was just as important if not more important to Ophelia at this nowhere-near-discussing-marriage stage of their relationship. And I think that explains why Ophelia and other emotionally challenged girls draw in boyfriends so easily. They have a counterfeit depth. For a teenage boy Ophelia’s engaging interactions stand in stark contrast to the normal behavior of most teenage girls who simply chase what is tall, ripped and older with little to no regard for character, maturity or long term compatibility.
When I chatted to Ophelia’s mother not long after witnessing the silent movie, she reiterated how much she wanted Ophelia to be over boyfriends. I cautiously probed for her take on how the boyfriends helped Ophelia cope. Her mother agreed that the boyfriends do help Ophelia cope for an extended period of time, but her experience was that Ophelia’s drama always managed to burn out a boyfriend after four to six months. The breakup would be painful to watch with Ophelia desperately trying to keep the boy and the boy feeling terribly guilty about breaking things off after getting so close. And yet usually less than a month later, another boy would emerge naively believing he had finally found a girl with depth. For Ophelia and probably thousands of teenage girls like her, boyfriends pick up where the medications leave off.
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