I Wish I Saw More...

    I've always hated Hallmark movies. Not all of them, to be fair; there are a few legitimately good stories among the lot. But 99% of the time, Hallmark movies are a collection of the same four or five plots, retold in about a thousand barely-different ways. Their one redeeming quality is that, for people like my mom who can't handle much suspense in a movie, they are excellent because once you've watched one, you've basically watched them all, so you know exactly how it ends.

    Add to that the fact that, over the years, I've seen far too many Hallmark movies for my own good as a result of my parents' movie-watching preferences (which, due to the reason stated above, are usually dictated by my mom), and so can walk into the room in the middle of any Hallmark movie, watch for approximately 30 seconds, and tell you who each character is and the role they fill in the story, and it's little wonder that I hate them. After all, I have ADHD, and I need some variety in my life.

    However, as I've gotten older, I've come to hate Hallmark movies for an entirely different reason.

    Hallmark movies are full of complete and utter hogwash in terms of what they say about love and relationships.

    I am a college student. I just finished my Associate degree in early childhood education, and as a result of taking a marriage and relationship skills class last semester, am now pivoting to Family Sciences as my major of choice for my Bachelor's degree.

    As a result of my experience in early childhood education, I have learned how important modeling is to a child's development. Children are designed to watch the people around them and mimic what those people are doing in order to learn social norms and conventions. The behavioral patterns a person observes in childhood will most likely stay with them for their entire lifetime, and so, in my field, we are taught to have the utmost care in how we act around our students. They are watching us, and will likely learn more from the way we behave than they will from the words we say, the activities we organize, and the games we play.

    As a result of my marriage and relationships skills class, I have learned how comparatively rare it is for a typical couple to have a legitimately and wholly healthy relationship. Marriage rates have been dropping for years, and divorce rates have been skyrocketing. Part of this is due to how easy it is for couples to get divorced nowadays--but it's also partly because a lot of couples enter marriage completely unprepared for everything it entails.

    Why do we, as a society, seem so unprepared for long-term relationships?

    Given my background and education, I would hazard a guess that it's because most of us have never seen what a truly healthy relationship looks like--not from our parents, not from our grandparents, not from our aunts and uncles, not from our friends.

    How do these two things relate?

    Well, personally, as a writer, I believe that stories have great power to teach people. I've heard any number of people talk about how they've noticed that people who read fiction tend to be more empathetic and understanding on the whole, because in the process of reading a work of fiction, the reader must mentally step into the story and put themselves in the place of the characters in order to fully appreciate the book. This action of stepping outside of oneself and into the mind of another is one of the core features of empathy, because empathy is about understanding what another person is going through and supporting them through it. I could give a discourse worth a blog post of its own on what empathy is and how it differs from sympathy and pity, all based on what I learned in my marriage and relationships class last semester, but I'll abstain from that discourse for now.

    That principle is only one way that stories can teach us. As human beings, our minds are in many ways hardwired to learn through stories. How many times have we sat in church, or school classes, or work trainings, and the person standing at the front talking at us used a story to emphasize their point? It is much easier for the average person to remember a concept if they learned that concept through an anecdote, because stories are more memorable than a dry list of facts.

    By reading a story, I can be taught that anything worthwhile takes time and effort through the journey of a young person seeking to achieve their dreams despite all odds. I can learn how important freedom of thought, speech, and creativity is to maintaining a healthy, cohesive society through the downfall of a dystopian society. And I can learn that true love is a magical phenomenon that will blossom within a few days as soon as I find that One Right Person and we'll be engaged before the week is out by watching too many Hallmark movies.

    You see, healthy romantic relationships are very rarely modeled in modern entertainment. Hollywood certainly doesn't bother about them--indeed, there are so many Hollywood actors who can't seem to decide which other actor they actually want to be married to that it would be ridiculous to expect them to portray stable relationships in movies more than once in a blue moon. Hallmark likewise cares little for realistic and healthy relationships; after all, they have a romance plot to be getting about, and it's so much neater and tidier if the main characters are wrapped around each other's fingers and getting married by the end of the movie, even if the movie itself covers no more than three days' worth of time in-world. As for children's movies, well, the relationships in most modern children's movies are more about finding friends and less about finding romantic partners, as most children aren't too concerned with getting married yet.

    Actually, if you really dig into things and start scrutinizing movies under a close lens, you'll find that there are very few movies at all that portray truly healthy relationships of any kind, be it friendships, romantic relationships, or parent/child relationships. Families can be rather inconvenient to deal with in many a story, and it's much easier to have a young person run away from home or lose their parents in a tragic accident (or both, if they stop at a wicked stepmother's house or an awful orphanage in between) so that said parents don't get in the way of the story. Likewise, when two adults are involved with one another, adding children to the mix tends to complicate things even in real life--imagine how much worse it is in a book or movie, where there are only so many pages or minutes and most of them need to be going toward the main plot.

    The problem with this, however, is that I believe it has very real real-world ramifications. If people aren't having healthy relationships modeled to them at home, and must instead turn to stories to learn how to live their lives (as Orson Scott Card once pointed out, part of the reason some young people read romance is to learn how to interact with young people of the opposite sex appropriately; this is a principle that can be expanded upon), then what they are learning from those stories suddenly becomes very important indeed.

    People talk about representation in stories a lot, usually referring to various minority groups who would like to see more people like themselves in the stories they enjoy. This is, I think, a generally positive thing, except for the representation I'm not seeing.

    Folks, where are all the couples in stories--and not the ones who are just getting together, but the ones who have been together a while? Where are the couples who have dealt with the first round of challenges inherent in finding a partner, and now must deal with the challenges inherent in having a partner? Where are the couples in stable, long-term relationships, whose stories receive drama not from the couple's constant breaking up and making up, but from the regular pressures of daily life, plus whatever the plot throws at them? Where are the couples who, despite their struggles, figure out how to make their relationship strong and healthy, who work together to accomplish the tasks set before them? Where are the couples who, for those who need it, can stand in the stead of parents and show what a strong, healthy relationship ought to be?

    Off the top of my head (and from the books on my shelves), I can name only a few examples: Hiccup and Astrid from the How to Train Your Dragon movies; Shallan and Adolin, and Dalinar and Navani, from Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive series, Ani and Geric, and Razo and Dasha, from Shannon Hale's The Books of Bayern series, and Robin and Marian from Robin McKinley's The Outlaws of Sherwood. Frankly, looking at my bookshelves, there really aren't many books where established, healthy couples work together to solve problems. Any other book that contains a couple is usually telling the story of how those two people met and fell in love, or else contains an established couple whose story receives its drama from the couple's toxicity.

    Having come to these realizations over the past months, I've slowly decided that I want to shift the trend. I want to see more healthy relationships in books, movies, and video games. It doesn't matter to me if the couple gets there through a lengthy and difficult growth arc, so long as I get to see them working together at the end of their arc for a long enough period of time that I can dissect what they're doing and apply it to my own life.

    So, I've been doing research, hunting down books about established couples in long-term relationships to see how their authors handled it. Over time, my plan is to start figuring out what's working and what's not and incorporating what I learn into my own stories.

    It is at this point that I'd like to call on you--anyone who reads my blog--to either pop down to the comments section, if the website will let you, or hop over to my Contact form if it won't, and tell me about any books (preferably of the fantasy or science fiction variety, since those are the genres I'm most familiar with) you've read that have a married or long-term-committed couple as the main characters. If you don't know of any books like that, but have some experience as a married or long-term-committed person that you think might be applicable to my hunt, please chip that in too!

    And perhaps, a few years from now when I have my Family Sciences degree and all the knowledge pertaining to it under my belt, I'll be able to write another post detailing all that I've learned. :)