One way that romance was impressed on a small child's brain.

I remember when I was a child, and I was on a train with my mother traveling somewhere, and maybe she was busy paying attention to my little sister, I don't remember, but there was a teenage girl, a young woman who was sitting next to me, and she was on the train because she was running away from her mother and she was going to go live with her boyfriend who really loved her. I was just a child (perhaps I was eight?) but I was a good listener. So I was considered mature for my age and the teenage girl needed someone to listen to her and what she was going through and it was fascinating. And my mother just let that happen. I was the one listening to her, not my mother. I don't really know if my mother believed in it or cared much about what the teenage girl was telling me, but she didn't stop it from happening. The funny thing is that my mother didn't get along with her own mother, so it would seem like maybe she could have listened to the teenage girl's story, but it just didn't happen that way, in my memory. I was the one who was the listener. It was not censored. Maybe my mother was taking a nap or something! As a matter of fact, I think I might have tried to talk to my mother about it later, and she might have scoffed at the story. I'm sorry if this makes her sound insensitive. Yeah, there wasn't a lot of messages about how we all need to take care of the teenage girls when I was growing up. Teenage girls were on their own. They were pretty much mini adults. They could run away with their boyfriends from the mothers who didn't seem to care about them.