It was a month or so ago when Brett, my sister’s eldest son, nonchalantly made the announcement to his mother.

“Mom, I have a girlfriend.”

And, like that, Brett had entered the universe of love and dating. The high schooler, without fanfare, was in a relationship.

Wow. Easy peasy.

It happens.

Who knows why, or how, or why when the heart of a young person opens up and that nebulous thing of being in a relationship becomes a thing of relevance, of significance, of substance.

And with that announcement, I- single me- realized my sister and her husband got to enter the sphere of parenting that must be fraught with question marks and concerns: what does this mean, my child having a girlfriend? Does he know what love is? What will these kids do together? Is he old enough to know what a relationship is? Will he be caring with her? Does he know what sex is for? Will he and she end up in trouble? How will he handle when it is over?

So many questions parents must ask.

As for me, I applaud his plunge into love and friendship as a teen. It means he is willing to take chances to be close to a gal. He wants to be connected to someone.

He’s farther along at his age than I was.

For whatever reasons, dating was a frightening and baffling prospect to me as a teenager. I didn’t understand it for all the other kids who paired up and went around. You were to young to get married- why pretend to do so when you are still a kid, I thought.

But I was also a normal teenager, and deep inside, I felt some envy at those guys who had girlfriends. My lack of understanding it didn’t completely answer my wish for a girlfriend. I was just acutely shy, acutely insecure, and romantically challenged. Love was for other people. I just watched other kids pair up and in private ached at my isolation. That’s life as an evangelical Christian kid, raised amidst some silence about love and sex, oriented to be selfless and mindful about deeper, more important (spiritual) things. I had crush after crush during high school, and inevitably, the girls I was crazy about never saw me (or wanted to see me) as any more than I nice guy. So, I never thought I was very attractive to girls that way.

I had one or two moments in high school where I stood at the precipice of a potential relationship with a girl. And in those moments, I froze up, panicked, backed away, and let them go by.

I got through high school without ever kissing a girl, which may be normal for a percentage of the population who are like me.

My first intimate experience with a girl in a relationship was short-lived and simple. I don’t know how it started, and I don’t know why it ended, but I remember late in my senior year going to two weekend movies with a quiet, cute and friendly red-headed girl from another high school in town, Sandia. She was kind and she clearly liked me, and we held hands during both of the movies, and after the few weeks we went separate ways. I am pretty sure that was my choice, my inadequacy keeping her distant, not letting her get to know and get close to me.

She is a bright memory in my personal history, though I don’t remember much else about “us”. That short relationship was warm and clean and empathetic, rosy against the gray of my romantic track record as a teen. Clearly what we did little of was talking a whole lot. We were both quiet and awkward kids trying to figure out a little bit of this thing called love.

It took me until my sophomore year in college to try and have a girlfriend, and I am not sure I was ready for that then. And that was a rocky experiment.

Brett- I think he’ll do pretty well as a boyfriend. He is polite and seems to act from the good guy code, striving to be thoughtful and considerate with her. But, more to his credit and hers, they talk to each other. He seems to understand that a great dating relationship is best found between real and good friends.

Way to go, buddy. Wishing you a great love there, wrapped in layers and layers and layers of fantastic friendship.