Bumping into a teenage sweetheart can be jarring. Do you feel a twinge of nostalgia, the stirring of old emotions as you notice puppy fat has disappeared to reveal a strong bone structure? Or do you internally cringe, turn and walk the other way?
[Warning: spoilers ahead]
For Lily Bloom, in Colleen Hoover’s much-adored novel It Ends With Us, running into her first love Atlas reignites a fizz of buried feelings. The book, which has been adapted for screen starring Blake Lively and Brandon Sklenar, sees the pair reunite after decades apart, only to discover that what once passed between them still lingers. There’s only one hitch: Lily is already in a committed relationship with Ryle (Justin Baldoni).
Directed by Baldoni, the film centres around the passionate and fraught relationship of Lily and Ryle. While Ryle’s violent streak first appears accidental, his aggressive and jealous outbursts grow as Lily reconnects with her childhood love who becomes increasingly worried about her safety, driving her to come to terms with the abuse she’s been living with. The important themes around domestic abuse and violence against women addressed in the film have been commended by Women’s Aid, who tell Cosmopolitan: “it is important for popular culture to show survivors of domestic abuse they are not alone,” but the charity also warned that some of the content could be “dangerous and retraumatising for survivors”.
Running alongside Lily’s recognition that she is in an abusive relationship, is the rekindling of her youthful romance. It’s a narrative we seem to be culturally obsessed with; a Hallmark moment we long to return to. Think Jenna in 00s romcom 13 Going on 30 (Jennifer Garner) who realises her teenage best friend Matty (Mark Ruffalo) was the love of her life all along. Meanwhile in this year’s Challengers, feuding tennis players Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) hold grudges over an early relationship well into their thirties, and viewers became obsessed with Celine Song’s Past Lives (2023), in which childhood loves Nora Moon (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) reunite as adults and wonder what could have been.
Even Sex and the City dedicated an episode to Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) dating her high school boyfriend Jeremy (David Duchovny). In Carrie fashion this brief romance sparks more questions than answers: “If I had the guy in high school what have I been doing for the past twenty years?” It’s a question that runs through most cultural references to rekindling of young love – perhaps it was there all along?
As on screen, music lifts teenage romance to dizzyingly sweet heights. Remember Katy Perry singing about feeling like she’s living a teenage dream? While Taylor Swift’s first two albums are brimming with the intensity of young love, which she returned to with the retrospection of a thirty-year-old woman in Midnight Rain: “I guess sometimes we all get / Some kind of haunted, some kind of haunted / And I never think of him / Except on midnights like this.”
As we live through the age of chronic online dating, replete with doomscrolling, screenshotting and straight-up celibacy, it's easy to reminisce about a time that was more about make-out sessions than it was about ghosting. But is this obsession of ours a worthwhile consideration? After all, young love is all about nervous first experiences, before we were jaded by a litany of bad break-ups. Or is our desire to believe in romantic fairy tales just a distraction after strings of bad dates or stale long-term relationships that is sending us backwards? And hasn’t dating always been a struggle?
Clinical psychologist Dr. Yasmin Saad thinks there is more to this cultural trope than just the cynicism of age and a quickly draining dating pool. “Most people want to relive better times than they experienced in their past. Nostalgia for these times leads us to think of first loves as symbolic of purity and innocence,” she says. “We chose our first loves from the heart before our minds thought of tactics or things to do to find a partner. As a result, she explains, we might associate childhood loves and the idea of rekindling a young romance as a route to “returning to our authentic self without having to be guarded”. Essentially, as a way of becoming young again.
Depending on how things ended, we might also picture our first loves in an impossibly dazzling light that no adult romance can hold a candle to. Part of what makes Past Lives resonate is its careful balance between sentimentality and reality. Both Nara and Hae Sung are moved by the sight of each other. Seeing the adults they have become after being separated as 12-year-old classmates takes them back to those nascent youthful feelings. Although their lives now are so different, Nara still muses on an alternative path, one in which she stayed in Seoul, kept her Korean name and married Hae Sung. While Nara knows that life could and should never happen, Hae Sung struggles to prevent the rose-tinted glasses getting the better of him.
It Ends With Us also explores another side to young love: the idea that childhood sweethearts might see a lot more of our true selves than we allow those in adulthood to see, especially when it comes to trickier emotions. When Lily and Atlas first meet as teenagers, they are instantly bonded by their shared trauma; both of their mothers are suffering abuse from the men in their lives. Atlas, already accustomed to Lily’s experience, becomes quickly attuned to how her parents shape her fears and when the pair reunite years later, he sees a traumatic pattern emerging in her relationship with Ryle.
Of course, the idea that our young loves know us better than those we meet in later life is far from reality. Psychologist Dr. Michele Leno, explains that “the history that comes with such romances provides the familiarity that most love in relationships. There is an opportunity to rewrite a love story and make it even more appealing.” However, she argues that returning to a first love can have its drawbacks: “We romanticise the past and what could have been, without acknowledging that the transition from childhood to adulthood is substantial.”
Dr. Leno’s advice for any who are thinking of reigniting an old spark is to remember that “Since people and plans change, the relationship may not be as effortless as we imagined. Current reality may not match your memories, so it is important to manage your expectations.” This is something I’ve experienced myself. When I tried to rekindle a teenage romance, soon finding that we had both significantly changed in the years since. As the months of texting drew out, we realised that we had little in common besides our past crushes and it certainly wasn’t enough to fan an existing flame.
So, perhaps childhood romance is best left in the past, as defining as these first relationships may have been. Just as our early music taste determines our Spotify wrapped today, our early relationships inform our future ones, but it doesn’t mean we want to listen to the pop music of our teen years on repeat. It just doesn’t land the same. While for the majority of us, reigniting childhood romances isn’t going to result in a fairytale ending, at least it’s enjoyable to watch on screen – as long as we don’t take it too seriously.
