What Is Love? Baby, Don't Hurt Me..

How the Media Landscape Has Messed With Our Perceptions of What Relationships Look Like

What is love, and what does a “proper” relationship look like, especially in the modern era where the situationship and the online of it all make things so much more complicated on the surface?

Photo by Michael Fenton on Unsplash

So much media growing up has shown us that there has to be a struggle in falling in love - even if there is the perfect love story, there’s a middle bit where it all falls to shit just so they can have that big romantic boombox over the head moment at the end to win it all back. It teaches us that love itself should be something that is difficult, and that the one who chooses us from the beginning isn’t the right choice - and often, that isn’t right at all. I recently read and loved this piece by

darkhouse

on the indecisiveness of men and their looking eternally for a “flat” woman.

I have had three romantic relationships as an adult, and a whole lot of therapy over that time, and it is really only in the last three years that the eye opening “Oh, it doesn’t have to be struggle” has kicked in big time. I’ve learned that actually communicating my needs instead of assuming I have a psychic partner is an important tactic in all of this. While there are definitely parts of previous relationships where I can point out faults in those partners in how our relationships came to end, I am absolutely down with the blame for assuming that the things going on in my brain would be “common sense” to other people and not actively communicating my needs. How much of this is down to women not being encouraged to express that they have wants and needs that perhaps may differ from what the male partner in their life, that’s yet to be fully pulled apart. (I have joked with my therapist, a wonderful man who has changed my life in the work we have done in our sessions, that I want a plaque erected for the wing of his house which I am funding with my therapy sessions).

Regardless of their flaws and things they may have done, a lot of the problem in those two former relationships were indeed me, but not perhaps in the ways that they were pointing out (the 19 year old boy telling 19 year old Size 12 me that I was fat, repeatedly, he was absolutely an asshole for that, but that’s kind of beside the point). The problem was that I had so little self esteem, so little faith in myself, knowledge of who I was, that I believed them. A quote from a documentary (about grooming behaviors by teachers in the US - stick with me) stood out to me so much that I wrote it in my notes app and brought it into therapy the following week to discuss.

“My value was given to me by the men who paid attention to me”.

I don’t think I’m alone in having felt that way at any point of my life, never mind for a lot of it. We’re taught as young girls that boys who tease us are doing it because they like us (this is something I am actively rallying against in raising a boy - but raising him outside of the traditional Irish Catholic Education bubble is a whole strange experience in itself compared to what I experienced - perhaps there’s a lot more to write about that, but not today). Even clothing aimed at babies and toddlers have slogans about “Daddy keeping the boys away” and “Ladies Man” which is just unnecessary sexualisation of tiny children at a young age. The messaging starts so young. Grandparents (well-meaning, I am not saying there is malice to it, even if it is irritating) asking grandchildren in primary school if they have a boyfriend or girlfriend. How are we still at this, in this day and age?

I’ve been rewatching Scandal recently (I must say, watching certain episodes of the second season before bed and waking up on the morning of July 14th to the news of an attempted assassination was a weird moment), and there’s a lot of discourse around the toxicity and bad messaging in the relationship between Fitz and Olivia. Of course, they’re not alone in television lore, they’re merely just joining the long queue of Ross and Rachel, Ted and Robin (Ted and any woman he was with tbf), Noah and Allie, Seth and Summer, Meredith and Derek, Big and Carrie, et al. There’s a quote in the second season, from another potential suitor to Olivia, who she is turning down because he’s just not toxic enough for her. No, really.

“I want painful, difficult, devastating, life-changing, extraordinary love. Don’t you want that, too?”

Of course we want extraordinary love. We want it to be fireworks and heart palpitations at them texting back, and kissing in the rain and all of the worn out cliches. We want the stories to be able to tell our grandkids, or to pass down in the annals of time, these great love stories of passion and the fates coming together to align two people at one time in perfect symmetry.

I have done devastating and life-changing. It did not do my heart good, nor my mental health. It increased the amount of storebought serotonin that was required to stop me from thinking terrible thoughts about my belonging earthside. It’s cost a lot of money in therapy, and chocolate, and in coffees with friends talking down the choices we’ve made and the reasons we’ve made them, because of course, it’s not just me who does these things, far from it.

There are lessons that we, as young women particularly, pick up from media from a very young age, especially in the era that I grew up in (I was born in 1991, so consider a teenage years of the mid 00s). There’s the need to be the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (hello, 500 Days of Summer), the need to make yourself seem aloof, to play mind games, to pretend to be someone you aren’t in order to fit into what they were looking for at any one time (hello, Sandy from Grease). An entire generation of men was “educated” (I use that word very loosely) by The Game, a guidebook on how to make women feel like they are lesser than in order to pick them up (Pick-Up-Artists, truly a vile concept).

Is media changing in any way? The series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (which, if you haven’t seen it before, it seems to not be on any of the Irish streaming services but may be available elsewhere if you have a VPN or other means, I HIGHLY recommend) looks at the ideas of love, infatuation, insecurity and mental health all with a VERY healthy dose of musical theatre and in reading interviews with Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna (yes, her of The Devil Wears Prada!), they felt very strongly about how the relationships and how they impacted on the character of Rebecca and those around her were depicted. Which does give me hope, but I definitely need to see more of this to be persuaded things are headed for the better.

As for me, well, I am currently in a loving relationship with a wonderful man who I have known for more than half our lives, a person who has seen all of me, the highs and the lows. Love is security, the feeling that a person sees you for who you are and not who they want you to be, it isn’t having to keep on running to keep up with the marathon of their ever-growing needs for you to balance their attentions. The dramatic scenes we see in media depicting the massive shows of love and devotion, or depicting the jealousy and overtly “protectiveness” as a necessary part of someone showing you they care, those aren’t real. They add suspense to a script, they keep us coming back week after week, or keep us crying along to the film until the last moments of the credits roll. Feeling secure and knowing that the right person will be there and not playing mind games with you, getting to be your whole unvarnished self, that’s a million times better a feeling than waiting for some rain-soaked romantic moment after lots of being let down, and I will take that any day. It’s the kind of love I want to portray to my son as what he should be aiming for, and the one we need to hear of much more in our media.

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