High school prom cougars
Some teen girls are showing a preference for younger guys
Recently, as I heard my daughter, a junior in high school, and her friends discuss their plans for the prom, I had a vaguely troubling thought: Can a 16-year-old be a cougar?
Her best friends wanted to take boys younger than themselves (much younger … two entire grades younger) to the prom. And one of those boys just happened to be my ninthgrade son.
Back in my prom days (when the big slow dance was still
Stairway to Heaven), I went with a boy who was not just taller than me, but older as well. OK, I was only a few months younger, but that still mattered to my friends and me. We would never have considered venturing out to the prom, let alone the school parking lot, with a boy in a lower grade, unless we were babysitting him.
High-school years were like dog years back then. A oneyear difference might as well have been a seven-year span, which is why the older boys looked so much wiser and more sophisticated than the boys our own age with acne. To score a college boyfriend was a real coup.
Call it young cougars, a game of confidence or just female empowerment, but the unthinkable during my highschool years is now happening all around me and other mothers of my acquaintance. A growing number of our teenage girls are unabashedly showing their preference for younger boys, saying they are not only more respectful than their older counterparts, but generally nicer to date.
“Our prom is this weekend and all of the eight couples in our group are senior girls going with junior boys,” said Rachel Koehn, 18, of Baltimore, who is going with her boyfriend of 16 months, Dan Duffy, a 17-yearold junior.
“The senior guys at my school tend to like to go out with the younger girls, so now I guess we are doing the same with younger guys,” she said, adding that, as a freshman and sophomore, she went out with older classmen before meeting Dan last year.
Rachel said Dan’s parents seem to approve of this new relationship, even seeing a silver lining in the fact that he is dating an older girl.
“They love me because he doesn’t have his licence yet and I drive him everywhere,” she said.
Other teenagers see growing evidence of this dating trend in their own schools.
“We took a group picture at our senior prom this month, and of the 50 of us, there were 13 boys from the junior-year class who were there with senior girls,” said Joshua Himmelstein, 17, who attends high school in Hanover, N.H., and has been dating Charlotte Sargent, 18, a senior, since last October.
“I think my relationship with Charlotte has made the kids in our two grades get to know each other much better,” Josh said, adding that he feels honoured to be with Charlotte. “I really respect her. I am willing to admit that she is older than me and has more confidence and experience. I think I prefer dating a senior to someone my own age.”
Said Charlotte about Josh, who is her first boyfriend: “I just feel so much more comfortable with him than I do around older guys. This feels easier as I can just be myself around him.
“The problem is, I know the guys in my class so well, it feels hard to date any of them at this point,” she added. “Whereas the first time I saw Josh was in September at cross-country practice.”
What began as a joke between two cast members of the spring musical (Peter Michaelides, 15, a freshman in my son’s class in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Christina Bartson, 17, a junior in my daughter’s class) turned into reality when she decided to ask him to the prom.
“I was really happy,” said Peter, whose mother approved of the date, but did not allow him to attend the after-prom party. “Christina is really attractive and nice and I just wanted her to have a great night. I like to think I would respect any girl as much as her, but I do look up to her for being older.”
(Peter added that one reason he felt comfortable being the youngest in a group is that his only sibling is nearly twice his age.)
“Going to the prom with Peter definitely made it a lighter load,” Christina said. “I like to dance and get dressed up. It wasn’t complicated this way, as we are good friends. But he was also so nice all night long, asking if I wanted anything, carrying my things. It was really sweet.”
Though I didn’t really need to ask Jordan Pesci-Smith, a friend of my daughter Florence, why she wanted to take my son, Charles, to the prom (he is adorable and charming, of course, just like his mother),
“Our prom is this weekend and all of the eight couples in our group are senior girls going with junior boys.”
RACHEL KOEHN, 18
I was curious and decided to anyway. Jordan’s answer was direct.
“If I asked someone in my grade and he happened to say, ‘No,’ everyone would know about it,” she said of their school, which is quite small. “Charles is like a baby brother to me. I could just have had fun with him at the prom and not feel any social pressure.”
As it turned out, Charles did not go with Jordan, and not just because he thought he was too young.
His older sister hated the idea: She did not want her younger brother at the prom. (Jordan ended up going, happily, with a boy her own age.)
Who knows what will happen to these couples? A longterm future seems unlikely; almost all of the graduating girls said their relationships will probably end when they go to college.
The younger boys seem to take that eventuality in stride.
“I want Charlotte to have a good time at college, and that is hard to do with a boyfriend living far away,” said Josh, sympathetically.
Of her romance with Dan, Rachel said: “We have decided not to break up until the end of the summer, right before I leave for college. We don’t want to be sad until we have to be.”
But if Kate Burkhardt, a junior at Dartmouth College, is correct, the cougar-in-training trend could continue as these high schoolers get older.
She dated her high-school boyfriend, one grade below her, through her freshman year of college.
They finally broke up when he went to college.
“A lot of my friends are dating freshmen,” she said. “That way you grab them before they are corrupted by fraternity brothers.”