Do we romanticize toxic love?
This question came to me after I needed to stop a Netflix movie a little more than halfway through its playback, and I have to say I held out for quite a while. In a movie for teenage audiences, a girl who obsessively, but with a romantic air of course, stalks her crush, who happens to be her neighbor, a rich boy from a powerful family, who is engaged in successful business, with a good physique and who happens to study in the same high school as her, a lower middle class girl who is ashamed of her mother for working in a catering company. All very coherent.
The relationship between these two characters begins with the “love-hate” that is so popular in adolescence, I steal your wifi password, I rub you a little and leave you hot because I know you like me, but then I treat you badly…etc.
In short, stories that represent us as idyllic, meaty love, forbidden, difficult, where slaps and disrespect are thrown every time they are offended by considering that they are treated badly, but that is precisely what makes them fall in love.
This type of stories are very fashionable, just they have begun to change the role of the “bad boy” with no job or future, for a millionaire and successful and unattainable guy, who actually is unhappy and is waiting unconsciously for this woman to change his perspective on life. Obviously, these types of stories tend to be more focused on a female audience, as it makes women feel like superheroes, and sells us on the idea that we can change a man. They have realized that the role of a successful man sells much more than the role of a deadbeat ex-convict. A perfect mix of “Pretty Woman” and “Three metters above Heaven”, with touches of sublime sex, worthy of gods.
Why do I criticize the exposure of these stories, if in reality they are successful and after all that is what the audience wants to see?
Obviously, they are looking to make money with entertainment, and this is what the audience demands, but in my opinion, education is not only part of schools, or learning at home, education in society also plays a very important role. You can use these patterns in movies or books to create a hook, but they can have a development, an evolution during the story that generates a different ending, where you really value that these relationships are not idyllic, they are not platonic, nor is it a healthy love, but, on the contrary, you can learn from these stories. We can really use the basis of our traumas to start stories that make us connect with it, to then show us different possibilities, and change our perspective.
It’s true that some platforms have been realizing that there has been a certain evolution (thankfully) of the audience consuming these stories. We see a difference in Disney movies, where the main hook of the movie is no longer finding the love of our life, who happens to be a prince who arrives on horseback. The story focuses more on other points, we see characters with a strong personality, with their own ideas, and we know that Disney knows how to do it.
Movies like “how to be single” are worthy of admiration in my opinion. It precisely starts with a character with whom we all could feel identified at some point, but ends up realizing how necessary it is to grow up by themselves, to love oneself first, to be able to build something healthy afterwards.
We live in a broken society, with hundreds of unconscious traumas, since we come from a past where emotional development was null. Physiological needs were the priority and that forced to silence and ignore emotional needs. Emotional education was practically non-existent. This has generated a development of behavioral patterns that make us choose our partners from that childhood wound, of which most of society is not even aware. Fortunately, today we have much more accessibility to information that educates us, teaches us and makes us understand this issue.
It is an opportunity for writers and screenwriters to create stories more in line with a more emotionally evolved society, and can be part of this development, making us see that what is healthy also engages and works.
