John Stamos is a man with a list of accolades longer than his mullet in the ’80s and more talent and passion in his pinky finger than most — and much like a character from a Disney fairytale, he didn’t quite catch on to the need to grow up until well beyond the age when most people thought he should.
The idea of tiptoeing into adulthood never appealed to Stamos, and in part, that’s likely because he’s never desired to tiptoe into anything before. Stamos lives with an exuberant grace, never quietly going into any chapter of his life but also never doing so with a chaos-inducing need for attention.
Instead, as he explains to CBS Sunday Morning, he rebelled in a way that might be relatable to some. Still, it wasn’t the center of tabloid news articles or something fans saw everywhere through a series of emotional explosions and out-of-character behavior. It was something more like a tantrum you might see at home when a kid is too tired to follow the rules:
“I went into becoming an adult kicking and screaming; when you have the whole world going, ‘You look 20,’ and then I didn’t have any of those tent poles that say you’re an adult. I was just skating through. I didn’t have to (grow up), I had Peter Pan syndrome, which is dangerous — you know.”
With songs like “Peter Pan” and “Never Grow Up,” Peter Pan syndrome is something we’re all familiar with, and Stamos says that it can actually be quite dangerous.
It’s normal to want to cling to childhood to some degree, be it as a longing for simpler times or as a desire to hold on to the familiar, but it’s not practical to exist in a state of Peter Pan syndrome forever. Stamos recognizes that within himself and describes danger as a warning to others.
He notes that he didn’t have a strong sense of support on the path to growing up; instead, he was told he looked younger than he was, he missed the “tent poles” of a way to adulthood, and he didn’t realize that — for a time — he was getting lost in it.
Alongside that idea of never growing up came another image for Stamos that he says was fabricated and exaggerated on all fronts: the idea of him being a Lothario.
“There was a long time when I felt like ‘I need to be this Lothario’ because people were living vicariously through me, which I thought they were, and maybe they were — but I wasn’t that guy. I mean, there were moments, but I think people thought I was out doing a lot of things with a lot of women, and I wasn’t.”
It warmed our hearts to hear the following statement out of Stamos’ mouth, one that was as funny as it was endearing and really solidified that there wasn’t a lot of time for him to be navigating life as a Casanova:
“First of all, the thing that saved me most was I would go to bed around eight o’clock. I was always asleep!”
Stamos is as handsome now as he was before, so it makes sense that people thought he’d be playing the field in his youth — he’s happily married to his wife, Caitlin McHugh, these days — but that early bedtime means he missed a lot of the all-nighter parties where most of that canoodling would have been happening.
Stamos might have lived with Peter Pan syndrome for most of his life, but his soul has always seemed wise beyond his years — and his vulnerability in talking about the hang-ups he had growing up might be exactly what his fans need to hear.
