“You’d rather make up a fantasy version of somebody in your head than be with a real person.”
Jenny Han, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
Certain books which were made into movies by Netflix are capable of sparking a ray of hope in a reader’s heart. It makes them vulnerable and open to understanding love in the most unlikely way. Open to meeting new people, or even allowing others to see the real you. To remove the people pleasing mask and to show your real self, your soul, your likes, and your dislikes.
That’s what readers witnessed between Covey and Peter, in Jenny Han’s young adult novel, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. They saw each other. Not a quick glance in the hall or a cute wink sent from across the room, but the soul-glaring I see you. That’s what we all want in our lives: someone to see us for who we are and to fall in love with us, even if we don’t have everything together. It’s hard to understand what it’s like for someone to grow on you because much like Lara Jean, we struggle with knowing if that other person reciprocate the same feelings .
Personally, I would rather watch hundreds of movies about love than go out and find someone. It’s just easier to watch Peter Kavinsky tell Lara Jean that he loves her, than for me to accidentally hit someone with my car, or send out love letters to all the boys I’ve loved before.
We are able to see both Lara Jean and Peter Kavinsky for who they are, and that’s what we love.
We are able to see when characters keep it real when the odds were against them. When Lara Jean was finally able to be honest with herself and tell Peter that she likes him and not “in a fake way”.
In Beth Reekles’s romance novel, The Kissing Booth, Elle struggles with following the rules her and her best friend Lee made when they were six-years-old. Elle fell in love with her best friend’s brother, Noah, breaking rule number nine: relatives are off limits. Sometimes, we fall in love with people who are just so far from our grasp. Will something like that hold you back? When there are so many possibilities that he could be the one.
“I automatically leaned back, my head fitting into that spot between his neck and his shoulder. Again, the cliched romantic in me wondered how we seemed to fit so perfectly, two pieces of a jigsaw, and have such different, clashing personalities… I didn’t care how bad we were for each other or that he’d be off to college soon; I just remembered that I was in love with him.”
Beth Reekles, The Kissing Booth
There are people like Lara Jean and Noah Flynn out there. We just have to wake up, turn off Netflix, and go out and find ourselves one. They exist. I wouldn’t be telling you to turn off Netflix otherwise.
“It’s not like in the movies. It’s better, because it’s real.”
Jenny Han, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
Priscilla Vargas
Opinion Columnist
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