PenPenWrites

Lesson learned the hard way: Get attached to your child's boyfriend or girlfriend at your peril. They break up and you're left feeling the loss. Until they are an official part of the family, keep your emotional distance.

Many of us have been through it. A recent Carolyn Hax column was from a woman who not only grieved for the loss of the daughter's boyfriend, but for his dog as well. "My whole family welcomed him as one of our own," she writes. Then the daughter broke up the romance. Now, the writer says, "I have lost a big chunk of my heart. I was very close to the dog; he spent weekends with me when my daughter and her boyfriend did things together." She is disappointed in her daughter's decision–the couple seemed so right for each other–and she would like to see the dog, and the boyfriend as well.

Life is full of disappointments, and it hurts to get caught up in the grief of a breakup. It's so easy to say, keep your distance but what to do when the young couple spend time with you, move in together and make you part of their lives–then their relationship implodes. You're supposedly "safe" if  you get attached to a son- or daughter-in-law, but marriages implode as well. And if a couple lives together, how different is that from a marriage, in terms of the bonds you may form?

Well, sad as it is and good advice that the warnings are, the important lesson many of us have learned is to keep the sadness to ourselves and not do anything–like visit the dog or the boyfriend–that would alienate your child. Grown children do not take kindly to a parent undermining a big and very personal decision. Even an innocent remark in passing–"Johnny was such a nice guy" "Cindy was such a good cook" "Tiger was the sweetest cat"–can be construed as a critique of their judgment. Even a year or two later.