What is with All of This Mopey Love?
When I was younger and newly in love, I remember being so happy all of the time. I didn’t even want to eat or sleep, and I smiled quite a bit. My then-boyfriend, now-husband, did too. Sure, there was a lot of, ahem, meeting of the faces, but otherwise I don’t think we were particularly melancholy in our romance, unless it had to do with those common parental issues all teens have.
So why is it that every teen or young adult couple I see looks like they are about to commit suicide together? I am not joking here; they grasp onto one another as if they are aboard the sinking Titanic, bracing themselves for death as they desperately love each other. No smiling is allowed, and it seems as if they should all be clad in something that Tim Burton concocted. After all, most young women in love look more like Joanna from Sweeney Todd—stoic, flat, uninspired, depressed (and rightly so)—than, say, heart-sore for the boy next door Judy Garland/Esther from Meet Me in St. Louis.
I’m all for brooding. It’s often the basis for great art. But shouldn’t being in love, I don’t know, make you happy or something? Maybe it’s all of this “friends with benefits” stuff that I see. When I was a teenager, most of us were “going out” with someone, which meant “going steady” ten or fifteen years before. I am not sure what that’s called these days, but most of the young people I know now do not have boyfriends or girlfriends; instead, they sleep with friends, and their Facebook status is more often “It’s complicated” than not. In fact, I personally know over a dozen single teen mothers whose babies’ fathers are either not in the picture, or are only loosely so. Somehow I don’t think this is love, and maybe these brooding lovers know it. I guess that makes sense for the morose girls in these scenarios, but what about the boys?
I am wondering if these are products of loveless marriages—that these teens have no one to really emulate when it comes to love aside from reality shows, so they are reduced to this strange, dark love that makes them seem so tragic. Every relationship looks like it should be made into a Nicholas Sparks film (perhaps that’s where they’re getting their inspiration?), and while some may be legitimately dreary and hopeless (forbidden love, maybe, or an upcoming move where one is serving abroad or something; I have been in both of these situations and know how hard they are), I have to wonder if a love of drama is simply at the heart of most of these.
Either way, I would love for us to give teens and youth in general a much better example as to what makes a good relationship other than what we’ve been providing them with—especially in the media—over the past few years.