#(technically Inside Out and Zootopia too but those aren't about humans so)

[negativewriter26]

Our Emphasis on Romance

Do you remember the first time someone asked you if you had a crush on someone?

I do. I was nine years old, in fourth grade, and I was eating lunch with my friends in the cafeteria when one of my friends asked me. I gave my honest answer: No. After all, we were only in fourth grade. She accepted my answer and moved on to another topic.

As I got older, people stopped accepting my honest answer. Now, it is usually followed by Really? and Are you sure? and You must be lying! and How is that possible?. Therefore, in middle school, I started making up crushes.

I have had straight A’s my entire high school career thus far, and the fact that I have never had a crush before seems to make every other aspect about me irrelevant. For the past seven years, I have been trying to fix myself for being broken. How could I have never dated anyone before? How could I not want to be in a relationship? How could I have never had a crush on anyone?

Recently, I’ve realized that I am not broken. I do not need to be fixed.

Our culture does.

Romance is seen as the be all end all. Books about dystopian governments, about rebellion, about magic have plots that could stand by itself, but, for us, is still only second to the romance.

We emphasize romance so much that it’s breaking us.

I still remember whispers about Tris and Four’s relationship in Divergent in the middle of math class, while our teacher droned on about sine, cosine, and tangent. People binged The Office to find out if Pam ended up with Jim or Roy. There were days where two most important teams were Team Edward and Team Jacob. The epilogue in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has everyone married and with children. The Breakfast Club ends with four of the five main characters dating each other. By the finale of Friends, everyone but Joey is either married or dating someone, but even then, Joey gets paired off in his spin-off.

We are surrounded by the media telling us that we cannot be alone, that we do not have a happy ending unless we are with someone. We need to start questioning this.

Recently, we have been questioning the trite trope of the princess getting saved by the prince. The three most notable examples of this trope are the movies Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first animated feature film from Disney, yet Cinderella and Aurora have the same fate as Snow White: getting saved by Prince Charming, falling in love, and living happily ever after.

And Disney responded to the public’s complaints by giving princesses a new role. Mulan, The Princess and the Frog, and Frozen are three movies commonly credited with having strong female protagonists who don’t need a boy to save them. Though just because they aren’t saved by a prince, doesn’t mean that they don’t end up with one. Mulan had Shang, Tiana had Naveen, and Anna had Kristoff.

This new trope is causing a new problem. Now, for strong female protagonists to have a happy ending, they must end up with someone. This trope still supports the idea that we cannot be the protagonist of our own story if we do not fall in love during it.

Anna and Kristoff have each other, but Elsa has no one. Her happy ending is seen as tragic and lonely, because her canonical true love is her love for her sister. This raises the question: Is this type of happy ending sustainable? We won’t know until Frozen 2, but the co-director responded to the Twitter movement #GiveElsaAGirlfriend by saying that it’s possible Elsa will have a girlfriend. If this happens, we will know our answer.

It feels appropriate to be talking about these tropes this time of year. Valentine’s Day is in less than three weeks. Around this year, we feel pressured to date. After all, it is universally understood that no one wants to be single, whether it be on Valentine’s Day or any of the other three hundred sixty-four days of the year.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We can live fulfilling lives, in our teenage years, without being in a relationship. We need to start embracing that, but, most importantly, we need to draw attention to what is making us feel broken: our emphasis on romance.

Question how much time you spend with your significant other in comparison to your friends. Stop abandoning your friends when you start dating someone. When someone says they don’t have a crush on anyone right now, believe them. Be mindful while consuming any work of media, and consider how characters get paired off. Hold others accountable when they suggest being single is shameful.

Because for anything to change, we as a society need to first be aware that this is a problem. That’s how we got Mulan in 1998, over sixty years after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs came out.

So speak up about the harmful messages the world implicitly tell us. Maybe soon, there’ll be stories about princesses where a happy ending doesn’t involve falling in love.

Because it is okay to be single.

Because our lives are worthwhile without being in a relationship.

Because falling in love is not a requirement for your happily ever after.

I wrote this for an assignment in my English class during our deliberative speech unit. My speech, as you can tell, was about our emphasis on romance in media. This version that I posted is slightly edited to censor more personal information about me, and also while it isn’t said directly because I’m not out at school, I am aromantic and romance repulsed, so this is written heavily through that lenses. In addition, I mostly focused on girls in this speech because that’s what I know as a person assigned female at birth and my experiences as one.

If you want to talk about this more, feel free to message me or reply to this post. I cut a lot out during revisions of this speech, including how male protagonists are allowed to have narratives without romance, how our society loves love triangles, how it is inherently wrong that young girls feels broken for not wanting to date, and, but not limited to, how we might actually be unhappier because we internalize this message that falling in love is required for a happy ending. 

(By the way, if any of you feel like this doesn’t belong in the aromantic tag for whatever reason, please tell me, and I’ll be sure to remove it.)

#aromantic #aromanticism #writing #aspec #romance repulsed #our emphasis on romance #we need to deemphasize romance in media #we need female protagonists to have narratives without romance #(I am aware that Moana exists but I pretended it didn't for this speech) #(technically Inside Out and Zootopia too but those aren't about humans so) #phoebez