“Love, Sex and Other Misunderstandings” — The New York Times
This story appeared in The New York Times in a special section about teens on April 29, 1998.
It was written by me, Kevin Boyd, Phil Kennedy, Alison Nair and Jill Schnoebelen.
Nine juniors and seniors from City High School were sprawled around a basement family room in this university town when the conversation turned to the truths about high-school dating.
“We had only been seeing each other for a couple weeks,” said an 18-year-old senior girl. “We were driving around, talking about getting ice cream, and I said, ‘So, do you want to do it?’ and he got bright red and said, ‘I guess, if you want to do it.’ He had been talking about sex, but all I wanted was ice cream. I know that it sounds like something from an after-school special, but it really happened. That’s why I don’t understand guys.”
“It’s girls I don’t understand,” a junior boy, 16, said. “But they’re at a disadvantage. If they mess around, they get bad-mouthed.”
Two boys, one 17 and the other 16, simultaneously agreed: “Yeah, guys are labeled as pimps; girls are labeled as ‘hos.’ ”
For most Iowa City high-school students, one-on-one dating, with a movie and dinner, isn’t common. More likely, groups like this gather when someone’s parents are away, and couples form and split with plenty of witnesses.
“Getting the wrong idea” comes up frequently in the conversation. “I had been exclusively seeing a guy for a few weeks, but I didn’t know if he was exclusively seeing me,” said Kim Klouda, 17 and a junior. “I didn’t know if we were, quote, ‘together,’ or just ’seeing each other.’ One night I asked, ‘What’s our status?’ He didn’t understand what I was talking about, but we finally decided that if we were unsure, we probably weren’t a couple.
“Then on my birthday he gave me flowers,” Kim said. “That’s when I knew we were together. We never had a discussion or decided anything official.”
One long relationship has gone on between Grant Hilton and Jill Humston, 18-year-old seniors. At first, the couple were also unsure of where they stood with each other.
“Jill asked me what to tell people when they asked what was going on between us,” Grant said. “I told her to just tell them that we were dating.”
Last fall, Grant decided to ask Jill to the homecoming. “My friends called her over, and I said, ‘Hey, Jill, would you like to. . . . ‘ And before I finished asking, she said: ‘With you? Yeah.’ ”
Even parents would recognize a manifestation of these tentative, occasionally frustrating and often confusing relationships — that is, the couple.
