NEW MOON – Love Intonations

IT’S HARD NOT TO BE IMPRESSED AT TEEN LOVE. The movie, New Moon (2009), based on Stephenie Meyers’ book, targets the classic inflections of teen love characterised and polarised—such a love is so final.

We’ve all, I’m almost completely sure, known this sort of horrible love; a love so powerful it is painful, especially when it’s unrequited or broken. This uncoupled love and breeching infatuation, receiving no double jeopardy, has sent many a teen to their prematurely deliberate graves!

Such is love’s tension, played out tantalisingly in Edward and Bella, we find the bitter-sweetness of love made complete in the triangle as Jake is now added. No matter the “team” any of us pick, this love is dangerous, treacherous, captivating.

We all connect. Yet, why is love like this?

From the adult’s viewpoint—and with the benefit, perhaps, of the view from the Christian salvation perspective—we can see the point of such love, but that very point is so frequently obscured by our fear, a.k.a. either ‘what we think we’ll lose’ or ‘what we think that loss will cost us.’

Love like teen love is hardness. It is full-on passion and effused intimacy running full-tilt—beyond the strength often to hold it. It threatens to split apart, but we can’t help but be totally moved by the innocence and conviction of such love. Yet, its destiny often fails its near-promise.

And for the parent who’s ever said to their seventeen year old—in the heat of love-conflict—‘You don’t know what love is—you’re too young to know,’ they’re made an instant, irreconcilable liar in the presence of such love. The Pharisees have nothing on them.

Teen love—go figure. But, one thing we do know is there are strengths and weaknesses in all love; love, as U2 famously sing, is blindness. The adult has the advantage, however. Their approach should have been tempered; the hardness nullified somewhat. Does this mean the adult is beyond the intense pain of love gone wrong? Not at all!

But balance and appropriate grief should take their respective places... the poise of adulthood taking over to the degree that the loss is certainly not irreconcilable.

Well, that’s the theory!

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.