I never have been a big fan of Romeo and Juliet. Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, sure, but not Romeo and Juliet. There are some great lines, but the tale is just too overly romantic. The two star-crossed lovers are obsessed with each other, and it eventually leads to their completely unnecessary deaths.

Image Credit: disrupsean

Sadly, this glorification of all-consuming teenage love has not left our culture. If anything, it has become more pervasive. Nearly every popular song in the last 50 years has been a paean to obsessive love, from the Beatles “8 Days a Week”, to Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” (which alludes to Romeo and Juliet).

[The topic of crappy pop music is enough for an entirely separate rant, so I’ll stop there. For a more realistic love song, I recommend "If I Didn’t Have You" by Tim Minchin.]

Sappy romance is a staple of many books, including the incredibly popular Twilight series. It’s hard to find a movie of any genre that doesn’t have some kind of romantic subplot. Clearly, the romantic ideal of obsessive teenage love is deeply ingrained in our culture (I blame medieval minstrels ).

Teenage anger also has a strong marketable presence in our culture, but it is not affirmed the way that teenage love is. There are television shows and whiny bands that cater to teenage angst, but I take angst to be primarily inward-looking. Anger is something directed externally.

Often the distinction is blurred. Catcher in the Rye broke new ground in 1951 with its portrayal of adolescent alienation, and there have been many books in a similar genre since then.

Music, though, is the medium that appeals most directly to teenage anger. At least, in theory. In past decades, punk, metal and rap were all loud, angry, and designed to offend parents–that is, until punk became emo, rap became hip hop, and metal returned underground.

While there are media that market to teenage anger, most often its existence is dismissed or explained away as a function of age. Teenage anger is blamed on hormones, or immaturity or dismissed as ‘a phase.’

So why is teenage love celebrated and teenage anger dismissed as hormonal?

There is certainly an element of brain chemistry in the anger that many teenagers feel. However, there are other elements that make that anger merely a rational response to their surroundings.

First, high school. Imagine if you, as an adult, were removed from your job and house and sent back to high school. Most people would be pretty pissed. Suddenly you don’t have any money, you may not have a car, you don’t have your own apartment, you spend all day trapped, bored, with people you would not normally speak to and who may take inordinate joy in tormenting you; wherever you go, someone is telling you what to do, and just to top it all off, you probably aren’t getting laid.

There’s a lot there to be angry about, hormones or not.

Adolescence is also the time that young adults begin to see the world realistically for the first time. It may be the first time you realize that not everyone gets to be an astronaut. There might well be a cubicle with your name on just a few years away.

It’s the first time that you see the world for what it is, and start to understand the terrible things that adults have done to it.

For a teenager in the 60s, this meant seeing our leaders make war just for fun, and create scenarios where the entire earth could be destroyed in a nuclear pissing contest.

For a teenager today, this still means watching our leaders make war just for fun, but instead of destroying the earth through nuclear war, the plan now is to allow us to choke to death on our own filth, even we’d be much better off if we didn’t.

There’s a lot there to be angry about too, hormones or not.

Meanwhile, the idea that you can fall hopelessly in love with someone at first site is definitely hormonal. You can be attracted, sure, but constantly obsessing over some girl you just saw walk down the hallway, getting fantastically nervous to talk to her, then finally doing it several weeks later, by which time you have lost interest or she’s dating a football player, is not a map to a sustainable relationship.

If someone says “I can’t live without you,” and they haven’t been with that person for a good 30 years, they are either 1) lying or 2) a stalker. Hormonally driven teenage lust is not a template for how adults should behave.

Both teenage love and teenage anger are partially related to brain chemistry. Both can be taken to extremes (as in school shootings or stalkers). Extreme behavior is nearly always wrong, no matter what the source.

By celebrating obsessive teenage love, we provide a ridiculous template for adult interactions.

By dismissing teenage anger, we lose the opportunity to re-examine our world through the eyes of someone seeing it for the first time. We may have become comfortable with things like war, corruption and pollution, but seeing a younger person become angry at these things can remind us that we should be too.

Of course, affirming teenage anger means examining the flaws in the structure of our society while idolizing teenage love means another generation of people buying Valentine’s Day cards for the rest of their lives.

No wonder we’re urged to take one and not the other.