When her teenaged daughter started dating, even Lisa A. Phillips, who has authored a book on teenaged love and heartbreak, was surprised by her extremely visceral feelings.
“I wanted to protect her,” said Phillips, a professor of journalism and digital media at SUNY New Paltz. “I didn’t want her to go through all the pain that I remember going through. I really felt panicked.
“I thought, ‘This is something I need to dig into: Not just how to talk to young people … as they begin their existence as romantic beings, but also what happens internally to parents and what they go through.’”
The result was “First Love: Guiding Teens Through Relationships and Heartbreak,” a book published last February. Phillips spoke about her research at the Rye Presbyterian Church chapel recently in a conversation with RPC Co-Pastor Cari Pattison.
The event, hosted by Pattison and Rabbi Daniel Gropper of Community Synagogue of Rye, drew an audience of parents of teens, twenty-somethings, and beyond. One mother-teen duo even attended, all interested in the complicated reality of dating in 2025.
Phillips noted both the psychological and physiological impact of breakups. In navigating a teen’s first heartbreak, Phillips stressed the importance of acknowledging a child’s pain and providing continuous check-ins.
“Validation is the biggest and most important step, whether it is a relationship that was five years long … a relationship that was all online … or a ‘situationship’ that was particularly torturous,” Phillips said.
Audience members asked for advice on getting teens to open up about their romantic lives. Face-to-face intimacy, Phillips said, can be hard for teens; try having conversations in side-by-side settings, like in car rides or while doing chores. “Rehearsing” difficult conversations, like breaking up or talks about consent, can be helpful too.
In interviewing more than 100 teenagers and college students for “First Love,” Phillips noticed that young people often think there are too many romance narratives in mainstream media, so they dismiss the validity of their own romantic feelings as a result.
But they shouldn’t. Experiencing crushes, all-consuming infatuation, or intense romantic feelings is a part of “who we are…. [Romance] is not a myth. It’s not something to be ashamed of,” said Phillips. “It’s not something Disney and romcoms and Hollywood made up –– it’s who we are. So why not live it, learn about it, and grow with it as much as we can in this time that we have on the planet?”
Shifting cultural and social norms have shaped the realities of dating for Gen Z (those born from 1997 to 2010-12) and Gen Alpha (those born after Gen Z), Phillips said. Ambiguously defined relationships, for example, have become more common today than in past generations, offering teenagers more freedom, but also more confusion.
“Young people get the message [that they] can’t bring up certain issues or needs or desires because it’s not an ‘official’ relationship,” Phillips said. “Even if it’s not an exclusive, official relationship … it is a relationship. You’re in relationships with people. I’m in relationship with you right now …. We still are people who get to show up and say what we need.”
She also acknowledged social media’s role in an earlier exposure to sexual content and a precarious sense of digital privacy. The possibility of a romantic rejection being posted online is now a reality, further dissuading teenagers from taking romantic and emotional risks.
Pattison’s and Phillips’s conversation emphasized the importance of an “emotional education,” both for teens and for adults, as they encounter, process, and grow from romantic experiences. This “love-life literacy,” as Phillips calls it, empowers teenagers to understand and identify healthy (or unhealthy) feelings and behaviors.
Parents can facilitate this even before their child experiences a first relationship, Phillips said. In talking about romance, morals, and consent in pop culture, books, or in friends’ lives, parents can make it easier for a teen to feel comfortable talking to an adult when they do start dating. Becoming “romantic philosophers” as a family, a term coined by Rick Weissbourd of the Making Caring Common initiative, is a powerful tool in showing teens that a parent finds the topic of love to be interesting and worthwhile.
Phillips — who has written on teenage love for “Psychology Today,” “Long Reads,” and “The Washington Post” — addressed such common concerns from parents of teenagers as the effects of the youth mental health crisis on dating and the special concerns of LGBTQ+ youth.
Phillips also encouraged adults to reflect on their own romantic lives with compassion, self-awareness, and generosity. “First Love” has a “focus on teens,” Phillips said, “but speaks to the larger issues that we all go through, whether we’re partnered or not, whether we have kids or not.”
