reading love's (il)legitimacy through Netflix's Sex Education
// reorienting ourselves to teenage romance
The relationship was constructed, largely, over Words with Friends. Our first date was Beer Pong in a mutual friend’s backyard. We were watching Friendzone on MTV the first time he kissed me. The first time anyone kissed me. He said I love you from the driver’s seat of his maroon Jeep and I thought my 16-year-old self might collapse from the weight of it all. Over text with my best friends, I contemplated the bounds of love and desire. In spite of all this, if someone asks about my romantic history, I usually say something like, Well, I had a boyfriend in high school, but that doesn’t really count.
The refrain that certain loves do/not count is a learned one—I encountered it many times before I said so myself. It’s also a powerful one: to suggest a particular love doesn’t count due to age raises questions about autonomy, reality, and legitimacy. Who decides what loves are legitimate, and what parameters are inform that decision? It becomes worth asking: Did my high school friendships count? How about my relationship to my mother? Was the food I ate real? Being stirred by The House on Mango Street or The Stranger—was that real? At 16, my boyfriend told me I was ruining his birthday because I did not want to sleep with him. Was that real?
Teenagers fall in love. Teenagers hurt each other. Teenage years are a provisional time-space during which we could dream largely and wildly, we could feel without abandon, somehow less fragile or absorbed in the ego by being almost entirely absorbed in the ego. Did this make the feelings less real? Adults fall in love, and adults hurt each other. And sometimes, if only for a brief moment, adults feel without abandon too. The reality is that we’re all always doing our best to navigate feelings from a deeply imperfect sphere of reference. This is true irrespective of our age, and is a central theme of Netflix’s Sex Education. In conversation with Lisa Bonos for The Washington Post, the show’s creator, Laurie Nunn, discussed the importance of depicting the adults in the show as still figuring it out, oftentimes just as confusedly as the teenagers. “Everyone is still working it out. Everyone is messy and complicated — and you never really know what’s truly going on for someone.”
Yet, we consistently downplay intimacy that occurs during our most formative years. Where does this impulse come from? And if those romances don’t count, then what does? A quick search on Google suggests that, for all of the disaffection with which we frame teenage romance, adults are obsessed with psychologizing teenagers’ affective investments in love and sex. The webpages about what is “normal” for teenage dating and if teenage love is “real” run page after page, spanning peer-reviewed articles on PsychologyToday to sprawling threads on Quora.
In an article for N+1, Mark Greif argues that “we live in the afternoon of the sex children…in public we want to believe that children are not prepared for sex as we are, do not understand it, and have a special, fragile, glassy truth inside them that will be endangered by premature use—as if the pearls of highest value for us, our chase after sex, our truth of “sexuality,” should not also be the treasure for them.” In other words, we become extremely snobbish in adulthood, certain that lusty teenagers lack the emotional intelligence to understand intimacy and romance. Possibly, this snobbery derives from fear or insecurity. I get that love during adolescence feels a bit like groping around in the dark, and that there may be some shame or discomfort in revisiting what was done or who it was done with. I just don’t believe that makes it count any less. In fact, I think that dating as an “adult” often feels quite a bit like groping around in the dark, too, and that dawn only ever appears to arrive sporadically and spontaneously. For this reason, I think teenage romance is a generative site for reorienting ourselves towards romance more generally.
An extremely strong point of Sex Education was the attention it paid to teenage romance without belying its gravity. It didn’t make the feelings of teenagers seem frivolous at all. Instead, it granted its teenage characters depth and self-seriousness, the kind that always characterizes the internal lives of teenagers and often the external ones, too. Let’s consider, for example, the scene where Otis goes to Ruby’s house to meet her father. She shares with him that she has never invited anyone to her house, not even the two members of her tightly-knit clique. Upon entering the house, Otis remarks that it’s “nice.” Ruby replies, curtly, “It’s not, but thank you.” Her father, Roland, suffers from multiple-sclerosis and as soon as she opens the door, they hear him struggling and calling for help—he’s fallen out of bed trying to get a biscuit. His weed dealer, Jeffrey, arrives shortly (who also happens to be Maeve’s neighbor) and they all sit around a coffee table in Ruby’s living room. Ruby’s dad passes a joint back and forth with Jeffrey and the conversation devolves into a discussion about the Jeffrey’s sex life; his cat died recently and now his grieving wife, Cynthia, wants to, “sorry kids, have sex all the time.” As the conversation professes, Roland comments on how happy Ruby has been since she started dating Otis. Embarrassed, she commands him to “shut up.” He laughs, remarking, “It’s normal! I used to be like that about your mum when we first met,” which Jeffrey promptly seconds. Roland then says, with a sigh, “Ah, to be young,” and Jeffrey agrees again, replying “Yeah, it was so nice to be young.” The scene’s use of multi-generational characters for a discussion that traverses the exhaustion of sex as an adult, to the seemingly-boundless joy of young love, serves to juxtapose nostalgia with reality. While the older men indulge fondly in their memories of “young love,” Otis and Ruby sit rigidly beside one another. Roland’s statements imply an intensity that can only be accessed by young lovers, gesturing towards disenchantment with passionate love as one grows older. Otis leaves with Jeffrey after Roland falls asleep. The power of this scene lies in its reification of “what counts”; for Roland, who cannot walk for himself at this point, it is young love that mattered. Young love is to be recalled with delight and pleasure. It is certainly not to be discounted or minimized. Old love becomes a task, a responsibility. Old love “counts,” but begrudgingly.
In the following episode, Ruby thanks Otis and tells him she loves him. He replies only with, “Oh… that’s nice” and the two break up shortly thereafter. Otis tries to explain to Ruby that he likes her “a lot,” but he has to say I love you in his own time. “I don’t feel that way right now,” he says, “But that’s not to say I won’t. I just don’t at the moment.” In the scene, Ruby sits cross-legged on her bed and squeezes a pillow to her stomach and pelvis. He apologizes and then says, “We haven’t been dating for that long, and I don’t know if you actually love me love me.” Ruby responds, “I introduced you to my dad. I’ve never introduced anyone to him before” and then throws him out after he suggests they keep “hanging out.” The distinction between “like” and “love” is a critical one, if deeply abstract. To say, “I love you” to a partner is considered a milestone in the relationship. But what, really, is the difference between liking someone a lot and loving them, other than perhaps a word that connotes more commitment than another? Nunn’s choice to explore this distinction through the really taking its navigation by teenagers seriously powerfully asserts the characters’ autonomy.
After Otis leaves Ruby’s house, he helps Yacob, his mother’s (complicated-ish) partner, build a treehouse in their yard. Yacob asks if he is okay, and Otis says he feels like shit. “Ruby wanted me to say I loved her, but I didn’t feel the same,” he tells Yacob. Yacob replies, “You did the right thing…People deserve your whole heart, Otis. If you can’t give them that, it’s better they know. It’s the kinder thing to do.” The scene then cuts to Ruby, looking out of her window and crying after she has invited her friends to her house for the first time ever. Yacob’s suggestion that loving is equated to giving someone your whole heart, where liking someone a lot implies a partial or incomplete love, offers a more useful index for considering the discernment between “like” and “love,” but still feels theoretical. How does one know they are prepared to give someone their whole heart beyond an incalculable affect or impulse? It is this very abstractness that suggests a reconsideration, tenderly, of the way we understand our own teenage experiences with romance and intimacy. What makes a love “count”? What makes it legitimate? Is it age? Is it experience?
Like all matters of the heart, I couldn’t possibly answer any of these questions, nor are they answered in Sex Education. What the show does suggest, however, is that granting all romantic experiences the gravitas we typically reserve for our more “mature” romances generates compelling horizons of possibility for describing and appreciating more fully how we are shaped by intimacy and love.