By Sakshi Venkatraman
Staff Writer
@oompapa1
In the late 1500s, Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” gave way to a new breed of woman: the hopeless romantic.
Since then, with books and movies like “Twilight” and “The Fault in Our Stars”, girls’ expectations of the ideal relationship have only become more sickeningly unrealistic.
The stunning good looks, intelligence and romantic tendencies in the heroes of modern day novels and films set the bar awfully high for the gangly, acne-ridden teenage boys that exist in the real world.
Growing up in the mix of all these stereotypes for the perfect man, little girls are indirectly taught that if a man’s personality and physiology do not remotely reflect the traits of Edward Cullen, he is not a good partner.
In reality, that boy in that movie is wearing more makeup than most girls do on a daily basis, and speaks with Shakespearean eloquence because, just behind the camera, there is a machine prompting every word he says.
And all the while, the poor boys of this generation are desperately trying to climb the ladder to our hearts that a dozen fictional characters have already surmounted.
Girls, no matter how much we deny this, initially go for guys that are aesthetically pleasing to us, and we are often disappointed when “prince charming” does not swoop in with roses, chocolates and a suit of armor five minutes after we meet him.
It is a situation many young girls, and even adult women, can relate to. Living in an imperfect world, expectations of perfection are a segway into disappointment when it comes to relationships, especially in high school, but beyond as well.
A study conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics proves that 90 percent of divorces in college-educated couples are filed by the woman. In fact, for out of all the divorces that have occurred in the past one hundred years, the primary filer has been the woman.
This is not to suggest that the only group plagued by distorted expectations are women; the way women are protrayed on the covers of magazines give young men falsified perceptions of what a woman’s beauty looks like or, rather, what a women should look like. These expectations from both parties often cause the level of attraction and interest in a relationship to decrease with time and age.
Granted, there are divorces and breakups that take place for reasons that are very real, I know this from personal experience, however, 46 percent of divorced couples give “unrealistic expectations” as one of the reasons for their divorce.
This is the result of couples going into relationships with inaccurate preconceptions about what a marriage will look like. A lot of these notions preexist from their teenage years.
What modern day society and romance films/novels characterize as love is really a series of chemical changes in the brain involving adrenaline, dopamine and serotonin.
The thing little girls see as true love is actually just a fleeting period of infatuation and lust, something that goes away quite quickly.
To solve this problem, and possibly lower the statistics of failed relationships, girls must be made aware of the half-truths distributed in our modern day world. Also, proper education of what marriage entails, an eternal partnership rather than an eternal romance, would help girls more wisely make life decisions.
