The Twilight Conversation
What about love?/Don’t you want someone to care about you
What about love?/Don’t let it slip away
What about love?/I only want to share it with you
Say what you want about Twilight, but it’s certainly a book that can start a conversation – as we saw with John Green just last week. But honestly, a midst all the sound and fury, my favorite Twilight conversation is still the one I had with my big sister, back when we first discovered just how different our reactions to the book were (a rare thing for us). So, since it surely can’t hurt the world to have one more Twilight conversation in the ether – and because I think my sister has a very good point to make, one that speaks to a problem endemic in the larger whole of YA romance – here is, as it was, our Twilight conversation:
BigSis: Grrrrrrrr.
Byurt: Okay yes, it was ridiculous – but it’s just that quintessential first crush fantasy-
BigSis: Hey, I don’t need vampire characters to be gory grimdark monsters. But at first I thought Meyer was writing a cool YA take on the classic “sexy but soul-crushing” vampire. I thought her story of a wallflower teen girl loving a vampire would unfold into a metaphor about the destructive power of blind immature love-
Byurt: And instead you just got to watch the 12 year old fantasy play out. Together Forever.
BigSis: Such a let-down! This story could have been so powerful if it had dared to be about how unequal power and control can create an abusive relationship – not just in a ‘Beauty and the Beast’ nice naive girl – controlling man way, but in the choices both people make.
Byurt: Instead of idealizing the girl being completely subsumed by her boyfriend – giving up everything for him-
BigSis: All of Bella’s self-worth is tied up in her ability to be a good girlfriend, which she shows by making the relationship easy and convenient for him. She gives up her independence, her self, and her future, all her own needs, to keep him – even though the only way to be with him is to end her life, literally. In real life, especially when we’re inexperienced in love, it is so often exactly a girl’s instinct, to always do things his way to make him happy. This kind of one-sided self-sacrifice dooms any real chance for a partnership. How will he ever know and love you if your relationship is based on sacrificing yourself to him?
Byurt: There’s basically just that one line, where Bella admits to herself it’s pathetic how much control she’s given him over herself – but it doesn’t change anything, doesn’t have any ramifications in the story at all. It just skates on by-
BigSis: I find surrender most worrying in young women experiencing first love because there are plenty of social forces pushing in the same direction as this instinct to give and accommodate. At least boys learn to push back against being ‘whipped’. This is important because this pattern of too much surrender happens to so many real women, with huge consequences on real lives and futures. Teen pregnancy comes to mind. Or becoming a gangbanger to be with one guy. Or simply loving and marrying a man who, understandably, expects the marriage to go on the same way as the relationship, with the same level of submission to his needs. If you give yourself over completely out of love, how can you ever expect to shift gears from total sacrifice to equality after a wedding day? Where is the adult in Bella’s life to tell her that love is more than overpowering emotional and hormonal responses hung on a few facts, a few impressions?
Byurt: But, to be fair, is anyone really going to base a paradigm of happiness on Twilight? Are teens going to internalize Bella’s actions as the IDEAL in a relationship? Or are people just reading this as a fantasy, as wish-fulfillment, something separate from real life? I mean, sparkly vampires…
BigSis: Still, Meyer missed an opportunity to speak to the girls that read her – girls who might have actually listened and heard from her what they would never accept from their own parents – the fundamental, important things girls need to know about love, the lessons we all need to learn He will respect you and your needs to the degree you insist upon them. Sex won’t make him love you. Love is a different mix of things for a man and a woman, and you have to understand that thoroughly so it doesn’t hurt you later. The shiny happy new emotional rush wears off – and when it does you need to be best friends. To be loved completely, you have to be known completely and loved as a whole real person, and knowledge takes time. Bella comes from a broken home, isolated from examples of real adult love – she could have been drawn to the vampires from lack of connection in her life, but there should have been something disturbing in the comfort she finds is in the company of predators. The tragedy of how her choices hurt her and what she was missing could have been revealed-
Byurt: But it’s not just Twilight, is it? Insta-love is the standard, the norm in YA romance – it’s all trembling and sighing and that first-crush FEELS – it’s never (or maybe, more fair to say, extremely rarely) (and yes this is a supremely broad generalization) about actually building a working relationship, or about what a good relationship IS and SHOULD BE. In fact, in plenty of them, the hot male lead treats the girl like crap, but her love never falters – which is so unhealthy on so many levels-
BigSis: It’s so frustrating to see teenagers experience plenty of action without any coming of age; so much happens but they don’t grow or change – and the relationship doesn’t grow or change either. The Twilight novels provide the ultimate romantic fantasy – that who I am, right now, could inspire a hottie to fall in overwhelming, undying love with me. Bella doesn’t need to do anything to be attractive. She doesn’t have to try to be interesting in conversation, or have common interests, and she doesn’t even have to exercise. In short this is about as unlike real world dating as possible. In the real world, there is no magic ability that allows someone to fully learn about and understand everything about you and fall in love with the whole, real you instantaneously. Love at first sight is at best, a hunch – a sense of connection you then have to follow up and build upon with real information. It can be powerful, but it’s not final. Liking the same music can be a reason to date, but it’s not a reason to commit, and it’s certainly not a reason to die. So why in Twilight are we readers led along so merrily to root for Bella’s death? Meyer could have built up a wonderfully agonizing push-pull between our rooting for Bella’s love, and our resisting the inevitable death that would follow, a la Romeo and Juliet. “Alas, that love, so gentle in his view, Should be so tyrannous and rough in proof!” Sadly, ‘tis not so.
Byurt: In all honesty, overall I think it’s largely a matter of convenience – the mystical connection; the insta, absolute, undying love is easy, a shortcut to getting to all the good, hand-hold-y, sigh-worthy stuff – but all these books are wearing a rut, in taking that easy path over and over and over again, and I do wonder how many of all these readers (because these books are insanely popular) do actually think that’s it, that’s enough. What does that say, about their expectations of love and relationships – and what are they taking away, even from the most ridiculous of adolescent fantasies, like Twilight?
BigSis: My heart hurts for anyone who thinks love can’t get any better than the emotional high of the first crush.
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