Mum, can my girlfriend stay over?

Gone are the times when you switched off your cellphone if you were with your boyfriend or girlfriend. Now, you just take them home for that date. Aastha Atray Banan reports

Anjali and Vikram Sahu have three sons — and it seems like three daughters as well, that is if you count their sons’ girlfriends. As mum Anjali quips, “It’s in my family’s genes to be in love all the time.” She then turns to her youngest son’s girlfriend and tells her to make some coffee for the newspaper crew. The 19-year-old sweetly trots to the kitchen all while texting Vikram (the father) to hurry up and come for the shoot. The sons are also very much at ease with this situation. “Our family is like that. We are so involved in each other’s lives and are good friends,” says Pawan, the youngest. “I was friends with my husband’s mother, so why can’t my son’s girlfriend be my friend?” says Anjali, who just returned from a shopping trip with one of the girlfriends. “My sons’ girlfriends actually come to me and complain about my sons,” she laughs. As Vikram returns home, he sits amid his wife, his sons and their girlfriends, and says, “If they are not doing anything wrong, why shouldn’t they tell us?”

On the other hand, the Bhardwaj family is facing a dilemma they never thought they will. Their 16-year-old daughter, Ekadeshi, has a boyfriend and is now planning to invite him over for dinner. “Isn’t it enough that she is always on the phone and hardly ever spends any time with us?” says Uma Bhardwaj, “Why should it be okay to bring the boyfriend home. I don’t want to say no either, because then she will hide stuff from us, and that’s not acceptable. What do we do?”

It’s a tricky question. Where many families are toeing by the trend of being ‘friends’ with their children rather than ‘parents’, there still exist many families which are battling with the question “how much is too much?” A decade ago, it would have been near impossible for a teenager to take their girlfriend or boyfriend home, let alone ask the question. It was a time when parents knew everything, but pretended they didn’t. It was a time when taking your boyfriend to the bedroom was big no-no and the ‘parent friend’ phenomenon was still a very alien one.

Psychologist Seema Hingorani reaffirms the trend and says, “Just yesterday I met the parents of a 17-year-old girl who were shocked that their daughter wanted her boy friend to sleep over. When they said no, the girl lamented that why couldn’t her parents be as cool as her friends’ parents. We had to then sit down with her and explain to her that such a phenomenon is not acceptable according to Indian society.” It took Hingorani almost five sessions to get the girl to calm down and rethink the situation.

Somehow the tradition of taking the boyfriend or the girlfriend home has never been a part of the ordinary Indian childhood. But all the Archies (with the constant Betty-Archie-Veronica dating dilemma) and the Beverly Hills 90210s and Wonder Years got the point across quite clearly. And all those times when we lied and switched off our cellphones to avoid getting that’ “where are you” phone call, wouldn’t it have been much easier if we could just tell our parents the truth? So though many parents face a dilemma, many are trying hard to give the trend a boost.

Shreyasi Bhattacharya, 19, had been talking to a boy eight years her senior in an internet chat room for two months. But when he asked for her number, she turned to her mother for advice. “When I asked my mum, she asked me the usual questions.
‘Who is he? Where does he work?’ And then she told me to go ahead.” Shreyasi’s mum, Jayati, has a simple explanation. “She never had a boyfriend in school, and used to always tell me ‘find me a boyfriend to dance with mum’. I trust her and I trust the boy,” she says.

Margeret DeLima feels it’s all a part of growing up, so you just can’t avoid it. “My son Kurt is at an age where he will obviously have girlfriend. So I rather meet them than not. I don’t want him to hide anything from me,” she says.

But is it a trend that is confined to only a few ‘liberal’ parents with sons and not daughters? Swati Chopra and Aditi Sharma both negate this idea. “My mom has told me that it’s all fine till the time we know what our limits are. I take him home and there are many times that my mother is not at home and we are left alone. But she trusts me.”
Ditto, feels Aditi. “I feel my parents have over time got comfortable with this trend. It’s quite common now. All our friends take their boyfriends home. I think most parents are growing with the times.”

So is it finally time to invite your daughter’s boyfriend home? You decide.
                                    
b_aastha@dnaindia.net