BOSTON (AP) — Andrew Curtin said it happened at least twice at his Boston-area high school in the last year. Angry about a breakup, a boy ended up at the school nurse's office with a broken hand after punching a locker or a wall. "You don't think about when you see two people walking down the hall, 'Are they in a bad relationship or is it good?'" the 17-year-old Waltham High School senior said Thursday. But he was among about 250 teenagers doing a lot of thinking about healthy relationships at a seminar at Simmons College on Thursday. And the dating advice was coming from an unlikely source: city government officials...On Thursday, teens talked about breaking up by sending a text message, or being on the receiving end of one. They also spoke about fights they'd seen in their schools between students who were in competition for another student's affections, or felt jilted after a relationship ended badly. Counselors at the forum urged teens to communicate with partners about relationship boundaries, together defining whether they were "just texting," casually "hooking up," ''friends with benefits," or in a monogamous relationship. They also encouraged students to end relationships with face-to-face contact, and to look for warning signs that ongoing relationships could turn abusive.
I'm not faulting the idea, just the execution. Guys...it's the middle of summer. A gorgeous July day. You know where the guy were that could use this kind of advice? At the beach with their girls trying to figure out a good place to park later so they can get a handy and still be home in time for dinner. They certainly weren't in some college auditorium sharing their feelings about how they felt when Sally told them she'd been sending sexts of her boobs to someone else for the past few months. I mean these weren't even your sexually active band geeks because they're all getting down at band camp right now. These are just run of the mill kids who had nothing better to do on a phenomenal summer day. Better advice would have been: How to Deal with the Fact that Popular Kids Are Rounding the Bases and You'll Have to Wait a Few Years. That would have been truly worthwhile and focused on the target demographic.
