“How Do I Know If My Boyfriend Still Likes Me?” What to Say When Your Teen Asks for Relationship Advice
Last Tuesday, I was standing at the kitchen sink with my hands in soapy water when my 16-year-old daughter, Maya, slid onto the stool across the counter. She had that particular posture—shoulders slightly hunched, phone face-down on the granite—that I’ve learned means something is weighing on her. She didn’t look at me. She just said, “Mom, can I ask your advice about something? About Jake?”
I turned off the faucet. In the silence, I could feel my own heartbeat pick up a little. Not because I’m surprised she’s dating—Jake has been her boyfriend for about five months now, and I’ve met him at the door a dozen times, a lanky kid with a handshake that’s a little too firm, like he practiced it. No, the flutter was because I knew what was coming next. She wanted to know what she should do about her boyfriend, and I had approximately zero idea what the right answer was.
Maya played with the edge of a napkin. “He’s been taking a long time to text back. Like, hours. And yesterday he said he wanted to go to the movies with his friends instead of hanging out. He said he needed ‘guy time.’ Do you think he’s losing interest?”
I felt my protective instincts switch on. A small, hot voice in my head said: That’s ridiculous, he’s lucky to have you, if he can’t see that, he’s not worth it. But I’ve been a mom long enough to know that “dump him” is not actually advice. It’s an exit. And Maya wasn’t asking for an exit. She was asking for a map.
So instead of answering, I dried my hands and turned around to face her. I said, “What do you think is going on?”
She looked down at her phone, then back at me. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s tired of me. Or maybe I’m overthinking it.”
“What does your gut tell you?”
“My gut,” she said slowly, “tells me he’s just busy. But my brain—or maybe my friends—tell me he’s being distant.”
That was the real conversation. It wasn’t about Jake at all. It was about her trying to figure out which voice she trusted: the one that knew her own boyfriend, or the one that kept whispering from group chats and lunch tables.
In that moment, I realized something that I think a lot of parents forget. When a teenager comes to you asking for advice about a boyfriend or girlfriend, they usually don’t want you to solve the relationship. They want you to help them solve their thinking about the relationship. There’s a difference. If I had said, “Tell him he needs to text you back faster,” she might have done it—and it probably would have been a disaster. Because it would have been my line, not hers. She would have walked into that conversation with Jake carrying the weight of my expectations, not her own.
So I kept going with questions. Not because I was being a mindful, “coaching-style” parent on purpose. Honestly, it’s because I didn’t know what to say, and I’ve learned that when I don’t know what to say, asking questions is safer than giving orders.
“If your best friend came to you and said her boyfriend was texting back slowly and wanted a guys’ night, what would you tell her?”
Maya smiled, just a little. “I’d say that’s not that weird. People can be busy. Like, last week I didn’t answer her for six hours because my ringer was off.”
“So why is it different for you?”
She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Because I’m scared that if he pulls away, it means I’m not good enough.”
That was the moment I almost ruined everything by giving a motivational speech. I had to physically press my lips together to stop the word “You are more than enough!” from flying out. Because that’s what I felt. But that’s not what she needed.
What she needed, I think, was not to be convinced she was worthy. She needed to practice figuring out what she wanted and then saying it out loud. That’s a skill. And like any skill, she can’t learn it if I keep doing it for her.
So I said something plainer. “Okay. So if you took the fear out of it, what would you actually want to happen?”
“I guess,” she said, “I want to tell him that it bothered me when he didn’t text back. But I don’t want to sound crazy.”
“What would ‘sounding crazy’ sound like?”
“Like, ‘Why didn’t you text me? Do you even care about me?’”
“So what’s a different way to say it?”
She picked up her phone, typed something, stared at the screen, deleted it, then typed again. “Maybe: ‘Hey, I know you were busy, but I like hearing from you. Can we talk tonight?’”
“That sounds reasonable to me,” I said. “Would you be okay saying that?”
“I think so.” She paused. “But what if he says he doesn’t want to talk tonight?”
“Then you’ll know,” I said. “And you’ll handle it. You don’t have to have the perfect outcome to have a good conversation.”
She nodded, grabbed her phone, and drifted back to her room. I didn’t hear how it went until the next evening, when she told me over dinner that she’d sent the text. He’d replied two minutes later, said he was sorry, and that he’d been stressed about a history project. They talked for an hour. Nothing dramatic, nothing solved forever. But she walked away from that conversation knowing she could ask for something she needed without falling apart. That’s a bigger deal than either of them realizes right now.
Here’s what I’ve started to learn, and it’s not something I was taught in any parenting book. When your child asks for relationship advice, the most useful thing you can do is slow down the impulse to give it. There’s a real, practical strategy that works: before you offer any opinion, ask, “Do you want my take, or do you want me to just listen?” That one question does two things. It respects their autonomy, and it makes them clarify what they actually need. Sometimes they genuinely want your two cents. Other times they just want to think out loud, and if you jump in too early with your own solution, you accidentally shut down their thinking.
Another thing that helps is turning the question outward. A teenager can get stuck inside their own head. Asking “What would you say to your best friend in this situation?” sounds a little trite, but it works—because it moves them from “this is happening to me” to “this is a problem I can look at from the outside.” That shift is where actual judgment lives.
I’m not saying I have this all figured out. The weekend after Maya’s text conversation, she came to me again and asked, “What do you think about Jake posting a photo with his ex at a party?” And this time, I did give my opinion, because she asked for it directly. I said, “I think that’s a thing you’re allowed to have feelings about, but I also think it’s worth asking him about the history before you decide it’s a big deal.” She didn’t take that as a script. She turned it over, argued with it, and came to her own conclusion. That’s fine too.
The line I’m still figuring out is when to step in more firmly. If there were signs of emotional manipulation, constant checking up on her location, pressure that made her uncomfortable, I wouldn’t be playing 21 questions. I’d be pulling up a chair and having a much harder conversation. But for the normal mess of young romance—the missed texts, the jealous pangs, the awkward “what are we” talks—the best I can do is help her practice saying what she feels, hear her own voice in the quiet, and know that she’s the one who gets to decide what comes next.
Maya hasn’t texted Jake in the last few hours. She’s been doing homework, eating cheese puffs, scrolling through something on TikTok. Right now, she doesn’t seem worried about him at all. And I’m sitting here wondering if that’s growth or just the ebb and flow of being sixteen. Probably both. I guess the only thing I’m sure of is this: the next time she asks me what she should do about a boy, I’ll try to remember that she’s not asking me for a verdict. She’s asking me to sit beside her while she figures out what she already knows. That’s a decent job. Even if it means I have to keep my mouth shut and let her practice on her own.
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