Twilight Ruined My Relationship!

And here is Day 3 of my Video a Day program on YouTube which I shot at work on my lunch break and is based on a radio project I did for my Voice and Diction class last semester, which is a dating rant. And boy we have a pretty good topic for you today.

Now everyone knows all about the Twilight franchise and the fact that the new movie “Breaking Dawn-Part 2” has come and gone in theaters and did well at the box office. And I’m also sure you have heard that this franchise is perhaps one of the most talked-about phenomenons in modern history. In fact, the entire Twilight film series has recently been named the worst movie of all time. Yes, folks. They counted all five movies as one movie. You have to have been hiding under a rock if you haven’t heard lines like “Team Edward” or “Team Jacob” in everyday speech. But according to an article I read on Time.com, the Twilight franchise has also been blamed for breaking up real-life marriages and relationships.

Like the notion that vampires might be real, the stories spread in whispers. Rumors pass between fans in Twilight-centric online forums or at conventions. Somebody knows somebody to whom it really happened, somebody whose love of Twilight and the version of romance it presents got in the way of real life. Somebody whose marriage was killed by the undead.

While hardly an original idea that a highly-glorified fictional love story between two fictional characters can be responsible for breaking up real-life love, one cannot help but think that this theory centering on the risk of choosing fictional romance over real-life love can actually be true. After all, in this day and age, Twilight is just one of the many things that people have a very strong opinion of. It has been criticized by many for its bizarre views on love and how love should be but for its fans to actually act on it has everyone baffled.

Many people in Twilight-themed online forums and conventions as well as other online forums have spread rumors that the idealized romance of Bella and Edward have led to the end of real-life relationships and marriages because one of the spouses (mainly women) are so obsessed with Twilight to the point where she wishes that she had her very own Edward as her boyfriend or husband as opposed to what she has in real life.

In fact, talking about the ill effects of Twilight on marriage is by no means limited to the Internet. According to Details magazine, thousands of female Twilight fans even go as far as to make pilgrimages to Forks, Washington (where Twilight is supposed to take place) to feed their passion for all things Edward. And to make matters worse, there were reports of a man who went to a Twilight convention wearing a sign telling the world that “his wife abandoned him for Twilight,” because his wife was attracted to the fiction rather than the reality, which is sort of the problem with this franchise.

Though Twilight has been accused of breaking up real-life marriages, at the same time many people assume that the relationships depicted in those books with the weighty declarations of eternal love and intense sexual tension can become socially acceptable passion and can be more of a marital aid than a wedge, adding aspirations for intimacy and spice to marriages. And women would go along to say about their husbands or boyfriends “He’s my Edward.”

As if the dating game for men in today’s world wasn’t bad enough, now you’ve got to figure people’s obsession with Twilight and finding their own Edward Cullen as opposed to fixing their problems with their current significant others. At the same time, the girls looking for their own version of said vampire whenever they read Twilight stand to be either disappointed or harmed by convention that being masculine means being both domineering and wounded which in turn sets up the healing power of love.

In the end, it remains to be seen whether Twilight’s influence on real-life romance will continue to be felt now that the last movie, Breaking Dawn- Part 2 came and went into theaters. But like all things, the phenomenon has to come to an end sometime. Many people are starting to say that it’s now starting to fade and now that the final movie is in theaters that might come true. But whether or not it will continue to be a factor in breaking up relationships will remain to be seen.

Source material for this video as well as for my Voice and Diction Project:

http://entertainment.time.com/2012/11/16/does-twilight-really-ruin-real-life-romance/

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