When it comes to matters of the young heart, parents may be wise to not interfere. Star-crossed love a la Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story can be one of life’s great lingering tragedies, even if no one dies by the final curtain.
No one can know the heart of another, said Santa Rosa relationship expert Sharon Rivkin, even if it is your own child’s.
“When parents try to intervene in their child’s destiny, it really does not work because, in a way, it’s none of their business. Parents think they know the other person involved, but it is really overstepping their bounds because they don’t know. Parents need to step back and let their children’s relationships unfold.”
Of course, there are instances when a child is caught up with someone abusive, dangerous, engaged in criminal activities or truly toxic. But often, that guy with the tattoos and weird hair who doesn’t seem good enough for your little girl, may eventually mature into a nice young man. Or the girl from the wrong side of town will prove to be the one with a heart of gold who will stand by your son and help you in your old age.
“You’ve got to learn to step in only when you really need to,” said Rivkin, a marriage and family counselor and author of the book, “Breaking the Argument Cycle.”
When you interfere, you can pay a terrible price, leading to estrangement or family rifts as various members take sides. Rivkin said she has counseled with many people who carry huge regrets throughout life for heeding someone else’s advice about who they should love,
“They say, ‘I should have just stuck with how I felt.’ But when it’s your parents telling you they’re going to disown you,” Rivkin said, most people aren’t strong enough to stand up to that. It’s an unfair power advantage when a parent puts a child in that position.”
Some young loves give in, while others redouble their efforts to be together. Here are two stories of Forbidden Love where their heart’s destiny prevailed. In the case of one, Janice Rude and Prentiss Willson of Yountville, it would take 50 years.
Roadblocks to romance
She was a sophomore biology major, he was a lowly first-semester freshman who hadn’t even declared a major. But whenever he showed up in her cafeteria line at Occidental College, Janice Rude’s heart went aflutter.
She worked the cold station, the first stop in the line, serving up cottage cheese and cantaloupe. Her pixieish blonde hair was hidden under a hairnet. The lanky boy was always first in line at 6 a.m.
“Usually college students are lazy and have to be prodded. But this man,” she recalled, “was not like that. I think I was just impressed with how beautiful he was. His smile was so sincere and his eyes were kind. He was different.”
The girl didn’t even register on his radar.
“She was much too pretty,” the boy, Prentiss Willson, recalled. “I would never have asked her out. It was a boldness I never had.”
But the normally shy Rude became obsessed. In her mind he was dreamy and unattainable, like “a celebrity.”
“I was hot to get to work,” she said, “and then I dreamed about him at night.” As Thanksgiving break neared, and she dreaded not seeing him for days, she plotted a real meeting during the Thanksgiving dinner held in the cafeteria the night before vacation. She wore her best girl-dressed-to-kill outfit - a mocha-colored suit with fur collar and high heels. When she arrived she spotted his friends and asked where he was.
“He had dinner and left,” one buddy said.
“I have to find him,” she shot back. His friends rounded him up with word that a girl in the cafeteria was asking for him. Confused but intrigued, he said he “scurried my little butt back there” and the teenagers had their first conversation. A besotted Rude boldly fished for information about where he was going for break, not only the town, but the address.
It was a forward move for a 19-year-old girl in 1961.
“I was kind of shy, but I was driven by the fact that I don’t know this person,” she recalled. “But I thought I knew who he was.”
After her separate Thanksgiving obligations to her parents, who were divorced, she hopped into her sports car, her hair in curlers, and headed north to a town she had never heard of, Santa Maria, on the Central Coast. By the time she arrived, it was dark. As she primped her curls by the side of the road a cop swung by and gave her directions to Dr. Willson’s residence.
“I had to be stunned, happily stunned” Willson said of the moment the ‘hot chick’ showed up at the door just as the family was sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner.
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