Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight series has resurrected popular interest in stories about forbidden love. All over the world, Twilight readers have been buying copies of books like Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and The Undead Hair Handbook.
However, the Meyers series has come under fire for giving impressionable teens and pre-teens unrealistic expectations about romance, not to mention the whole vampire baby eating thing through her womb.
With Facebook groups like “Why isn’t Edward Cullen real?” And “Twilight Has Ruined Any Chance I Have For A Realistic Relationship” In increasingly fashionable fashion, many scruffy and poorly dressed teenage boys fear their chances of romance are diminishing. (To even the playing field, all other media outlets have kept their inverse female beauty / female clothing ratio at an all-time high.)
This barrage of unrealistic expectations is more than many of us can bear. For those who prefer their forbidden love to the old school, agonizing, embarrassing, and possibly fatal, here are some classics that should arrive as a breath of fresh and depressing air.
Painful Scenario Number One: Mutual Destruction. The forbidden boy meets the forbidden girl, the forbidden boy and girl are secretly married, the forbidden newlyweds are accidentally killed in an elaborate plan to escape the city. This is Romeo and Juliet’s strategy for love and it happens … well, not all the time, but it does happen.
Reasons We Like It: You know that fairy tales always end right after the beautiful damsel and prince charming are married? That’s because no one wants to hear about diaper changes or mortgage payments. A violent ending removes all boring stuff, as well as tapping into the primitive, reptilian part of our brain that links sex to danger and death. Which, by the way, is not the same as undeath.
Painful scenario number two: silent longing. The boy meets the girl, the boy decides that the girl is out of his reach, the boy swallows his feelings and vows to die alone. This is the love focus of J. Alfred Prufrock’s love song, and according to our secret diary research, it actually happens all the time.
Why we like it: We’ve been there. Avoiding confrontation is a great way to not only protect your dignity, but also to keep the fantasy alive – we bet someone special will never burp, fart, or call your mom drunk. On top of everything, the setting also appeals to our depressive fatalism. Not that this self-pity is going to wallow in itself.
Painful scenario number three: self-destruction. The boy meets an unattainable girl, the boy embarks on a lucrative criminal life to impress the girl with an elegant mansion, the boy lets himself be screwed completely. Er, shot. Make it both. This is the Great Gatsby courtship strategy, and while it’s appealing in its own right, we don’t recommend trying it at home.
Why We Like It: Dying for a cause can be very noble, and getting immensely rich along the way has its perks, too. Then when your love interest turns out to be selfish, you have a right and therefore not worth your time, you can enjoy the special satisfaction that comes from knowing that you are a higher being. This feeling will last for several seconds before the bullet becomes a problem.