What She Said: Why adult women can’t get enough of this teenage love triangle

I read the Twilight series in my early twenties. I gobbled it up. I would pretend to my then-boyfriend that I was tired or sick just so I could go to bed and read more. It had everything: the love triangle, the criminally attractive vampire who glittered in the sun, the werewolf with the bangin’ bod, the girl who was refreshingly ordinary, the teen angst, the raging hormones, the fear that at any moment, Edward might get a bit too excited and puncture a hole in Bella’s aorta… ah, just hook it to my veins (pun intended). You can imagine my delight, when in my first media job, I was sent to London to interview the entire cast for the release of the final movie. They were all very lovely, but it soon became clear that Robert Pattinson (the sparkly vampire one) would not be inviting me to dinner where he would promptly fall in love with me over a shared bowl of chips. He did, however, comment on my ‘cool phone’ which was enough of a compliment for me to return home, regaling my friends with tales of the ‘definite vibes’ between us.

I remember hearing about a particular cohort of Twilight fans who, at the time, were much older than me. They were in their 40s and above, they were mostly mothers (some to their own teenage boys), and with the moniker ‘Twi-hard Moms’, their investment in this fictional teenage love triangle was considered, well, pretty pathetic. Fast forward 15 or so years, I am now 35, a mother, married with a mortgage and if there is a name for the group of women of my demographic (and well above) who are unexpectedly obsessed with Amazon Prime’s The Summer I Turned Pretty, I, dear reader, am their leader.

If you haven’t watched it yet, quit reading this and go horse it into you. Give it until the end of season one of Jenny Han’s teenage love triangle (they’re all mortals here, mind you) and you will likely find yourself stalking the cast on social media, and seeking out as many behind-the-scenes clips as you can possibly find, with which to fuel your newfound thirst. You may wake up in the middle of the night wondering whether you are Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah and flit between the two. By the end of the second season, I actually felt miserable because A) I had no more episodes to watch and B) I realised I was not in fact a teenage girl-next-door type caught between two smoking hot boy-next-door types, spending their summers in a palatial beach house in the Hamptons. My toddler’s sticky fingers so quickly snapping me from my teenage reverie.

I am to this show, what those Twi-hard Moms were to Twilight. I don’t quite understand it and I can’t get enough. Women in their droves have messaged me to say they feel the same, confounded by this near-rabid obsession that feels disconcertingly at odds with where they’re at in life. ‘We are strong, mature adult women, what is wrong with us?’ one of them quipped.

First of all, there’s the comforting feeling of nostalgia. Most of the women with whom I’ve chatted about The Summer I Turned Pretty were also big fans of Dawson’s Creek (another love triangle filmed in the same location as this series) and Gilmore Girls (it too had a love triangle theme), both of which we would have grown up watching – and at the time would never have felt embarrassed about being glued to because, well, we were right on point for the target demographic.

There’s also the fact that it’s just very good. The music is sublime, with Taylor Swift featuring so frequently you’d think her songs were written just for the show. The writing doesn’t treat its subjects like kids but as fully-fledged grown-ups whose feelings are complex and entirely valid. The beach house itself becomes a character in the show. Even if you muted it, it would be gorgeous to watch.

But perhaps the biggest reason The Summer I Turned Pretty has struck such a chord with my peers is that it’s a safe indulgence into the avenues we decided not to go down. An itch-scratching exploration of the choices we did not make. Belly (that’s the central protagonist) is on the cusp of adulthood, she can see two very different lives unfolding before her, and that’s exciting. Though I am content and very happy with my lot, life at this age is, for me, pretty much on lock. By living vicariously through Belly’s lens, at least for the 50 minutes of an episode, we tap into a giddy, teenage, romantic part of ourselves (you know the type, where a brush off the arm of the person you fancy lights you up at a cellular level) that’s always in there, despite the arrival of a few more lines around our eyes.

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