Where are the Healthy Relationships in Modern Fiction?
Over the years, both as I read and watched popular entertainment and as I put out calls for short stories as an editor, I noticed a recurring bad habit in some writers: they have their characters speak nastily to each other, with no particular purpose, when they don’t know how to create real story conflict. Rudeness becomes a cheap substitute for drama.
Of late, I’ve started linking this tendency to a more serious one: popular entertainment depicts very few healthy relationships, especially not healthy marriages. Most marriage partners in print or on screen are either infidel, treacherous, unsatisfied, or unfulfilled. This is not to say that writers should instead show relationship partners as blissfully happy all the time; anyone in a successful marriage will say that it takes a lot of work. But little modern fiction shows that work, or successful marriages at all.
Marital conflict is a potent source of drama, to be sure. But fiction is also a source of role models, showing us what a better life can be like. And at a time when a third of U.S. marriages end in divorce, and growing numbers of people never marry at all, I fear that our stories are only reinforcing this trend. Instead of holding up an ideal of healthy marriage to aspire to, they instead tell us that healthy relationships are rare or impossible. The audience unconsciously absorbs the idea that it is normal for people to treat each other horribly.
And if people don’t have role models in their own lives for what a healthy relationship looks like, they desperately need to find them in fiction. It does take real effort and skill to make a relationship work. We shouldn’t abandon people to just figure it out by themselves.
Am I overreacting? If I am, then people shouldn’t be told to depict other ideals in fiction, such as racial equality, gender equality, representation of marginalized groups, and the like. If such depictions are so powerful and so needed that we have an entire industry of sensitivity readers to encourage them, then it should concern us when healthy relationships become a marginalized group in our fiction.
Perhaps part of the problem is that it is easier to write damaged relationships than healthy ones. If so, we as writers need to aspire to greater artistic heights—especially when we can teach real people how to be better to others in the process.
(Maybe I need to put out another call for writers to submit anthology stories?)
[Revised from a post on my Wordpress blog; I figured it would be of interest here.]