3AM Thoughts

Teenage relationships are often romanticized, not by teenagers, but mostly by adults. It is also funny how adults will either romanticized or criticized the pure love that teenagers experience. If you grew up/ growing up in an Asian household, like I unfortunately did, it was/will truly be a blessing and a curse.

During every family gathering, there would be a line of people waiting eagerly to spread rumors, true or false, about you. In order to complete their missions, they need a trustworthy source, aka yourself. Like worms, they slowly squirm their ways into your eyesight and occupy your attention, forcefully. Jumping straight to their intention, they would ask “Sooo, do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend yet?” “what does he/she do?” “where are they from?” bla bla bla continuously. Your fate is pretty much set after that. You’ll either spill the tea willingly or being harassed into spilling the tea forcefully. There are two types of reactions that you could expect. The first one is the one you want, aka dying to hear if you’re at an Asian family gathering. This type of reactions includes, but are not limited to asking for pictures, telling you that y’all look cute together, asking for details of how y’all started dating, first kiss, telling you that you’re the one for each other, even though they have never even met, etc. This is the equivalent of hearing that the Corona pandemic is over. The other, unwished-for type of reactions would be shaming you for dating, assuming that you’re doing something unholy, aka having sex, tell the whole family of 47928429854974 people that you’re dating, etc. Being the collectivist society that we are, everyone would end up slandering you for answering a question that you did not even want to answer in the first place.

Lucky for me, I got the first one every time, even though people were not genuinely being supportive. I’ve also seen the second reaction, and it’s truly a person’s worst nightmare when they are doing nothing wrong. However, they both got me thinking about the reasons behind the responses.

More often than not, I have heard adults complaining about their marriage life. It is either the boredom that is suffocating them, or the children are saving the marriage from divorce. It makes me wonder whether or not adults love asking about their children’s love lives because they are living it through us. For people who feel stuck with or bound to another person, they need a breeze of changes, a story that would make them believe in love again. Therefore, a lot of appreciative reactions are shown in the presence of a couple. Possibly, it could be because married couples feel numb towards each other after decades of marriage. They were desperate for escapism. When life does not go my way, I normally watch a movie to forget about my stressful days and submerge into someone else’s, a character that I want to become or relate to. Living their romantic fantasies through teenagers is one of the adults’ ways of coping with their busy lives. Almost everyone experiences high school dating, where the relationships are carefree, compare to marriage and adult life, full of exciting adventures, thoughtful messages, and gifts. How often does that happen after people have kids together? I bet that any of those rarely happen, if they do at all. It would make sense if they wish to escape their bleak daily life for a second and be reminded of how loved they want to feel. Is it bad that they want to feel the high school love again when the biggest problem was choosing where to eat?

In my opinion, it is similar to the people who disapprove of relationships and love. Simply, it is because they don’t believe in it. Love, relationships, or marriage have been nothing but a headache to them. But if they could experience love one more time, I bet they would want that high school’s pure love again, and again, and again.