I remember what it felt like to have my heart broken for the very first time. At the tender age of 15, I had convinced myself that I had met The One. Unfortunately, life has a way of taking away things that matter to us very suddenly, and very painfully. After the raw feeling of having someone rip my heart out of my chest had subsided after about two years (yes, that’s actually how long it took), I gradually realized that my perceptions of love and relationships were deeply impacted by this terrible romanticization culture.
This phenomena of romanticizing mental issues and the recent emergence of the hero complex is something that has become more prevalent in youth culture today especially in young adult fiction and social networking websites such as Tumblr. Within only a few years of publishing, John Greene’s books had more or less taken the young adult world by storm with its alluring yet deceitful portrayal of teenage romance and what true, everlasting love is supposedly like. Unknowingly, it had also somehow set the precedent of how I, along with many other young teenagers would perceive the concepts of love, relationships and romance.
Take for example his book, Looking for Alaska. Although I was completely head-over-heels in love with it, as I grew up, I began to recognize some major flaws in the character development and storyline. For one thing, even though it was never explicitly stated that Alaska, the female protagonist, was suffering from any clinically diagnosed mental illness, it was obvious from her self-destructive tendencies such as drinking and smoking excessively, and from her dark past, that she wasn’t at all happy with her life. The issue with this arises from the introduction of the main character, Miles Halter, who is on his journey to finding his “Great Perhaps.” As the book progresses, it becomes more and more apparent that Miles finds what he is looking for in the fascinating, mysterious, impulsive and self-destructive Alaska Young. However, the book can be interpreted by the young impressionable minds reading it, in an extremely harmful manner because even though Miles clearly loves Alaska until her dying breath, he never quite figures out the enigma that is her. In a way, he unknowingly tries to save her from herself in his quest to find his “Great Perhaps.”
Examples of this sort of romanticization and heroism culture are also extremely popular on Tumblr where images of self-harm scars or demonstrating mental illnesses via other means are often shed in a positive light. Likewise, FanFictions often sport certain variations of the “damsel in distress” type tropes where after the damsel is rescued, she and the hero go off and live happily ever after. As if somehow, her illness is magically cured JUST by his presence. So reinforced is this type of ideology, that it may completely skew the way young readers understand love and relationships. Unfortunately, this is an incredibly painful lesson I had to learn personally. My first heartbreak came forth due to many different reasons but one of the major ones was that at the time, I was dealing with serious mental health issues-issues that I ever sought out professional help for. I had subconsciously taught myself that a boy would come along someday and take away all my pain just by wrapping his arms around me and telling me that he loved me. And coincidentally, a boy came into my life a few months later. He wanted to save me and protect me. I wanted to be saved. But this wasn’t a terrible romance novel and it all fell apart because real love just doesn’t work like that.
The thing about this nonstop cycle is that it made me fall victim to this strange form of Stockholm Syndrome, where I started to romanticize my mental health issues in a futile effort to see the light at the end of the tunnel. But what must be understood is that there is no one coming to “save” me. And I shouldn’t be wilting away, hoping and praying that a guy (or girl) is going to come along, and “fix” me. And neither should anyone else. There is absolutely nothing romantic about depression or suffering. There is nothing romantic about spending your days in the isolating darkness of mental illness and waiting for someone to pull you out of that void.
Love isn’t based on fixing each other or becoming someone’s only source of happiness. Love is like any other relationship-it takes time, patience, effort, compromise and compassion. Love can bring a lot of joy into someone’s life but it can never ever be your lifeline-and it shouldn’t be either.