Fictional Fallacies

This week, while inconspicuously posed in the HUB, I heard various conversations going on around me. As I listened though, one particular conversation caught my eye…or ear, in this case.

I heard the word “Hunger Games” and honed in.

Yep. I’m one of those. I love the series and the words “hunger” and “games” alone forced me to listen into this particular conversation.

Sadly the conversation was not what I expected – the girls started talking about the romances of The Hunger Games…and then of Twilight.

Err. With that I lost interesting. But it did make me think, why do girls obsess so much about fictional romances, especially ones like Twilight. It’s clearly not a plausible situation. He is, after all, a vampire...

Why are we drawn to fantasy over reality, psychologically speaking?

To answer this, Psychology Today calls it a “fantasy bond.” This type of bond starts “to fuse our identity with the person we care for, relying on them to give us value and make us feel safe.” In Twilight, the heroine doesn’t believe life has any meaning without her vampire love.

That’s clearly not healthy.

And it doesn’t help that readers project the ideals of Bella’s vampire on real people in their own lives. This can only conclude with destructive outcomes.

Also, Psychology Today states that, “in order to live in fantasy, we have to suspend reality and give up the positive aspects of our relationship that we value but that cause us real pain.” That’s an important concept to recognize. You can’t expect any significant other to be Edward Cullen, or any other fictional love interest. It’s labeled fiction for a reason.

We, as a society, need to recognize no relationship is perfect. “The love depicted in Twilight is a figment of fantasy, a co-dependent, hungry union in which two people expect to be mutually rescued and bound for eternity.”

In reality, we can’t expect this. To be honest, the most we can find in another people is, as Psychology Today puts it: “someone who we feel respect, attraction, and admiration, someone who encourages us to challenge our own defenses and limitations, and who helps us to become our better selves.”

Girls need to realize a novel is not reality - when we confuse the real world with what we read, we lose touch with reality. Striving for an Edward Cullen is the perfect way to end up in an unhealthy and unsettling mindset and relationship.

Escaping into a novel is fine, but believing that the novel is reality is a habit girls need to break.