Chapter 21

Baby Love: Underage Love Stories

Most audiences can relate to stories of first love. Adolescents who fall in love are sure that if it goes wrong they will die of the pain. Thankfully most of them survive and live to love another day. It is a universal experience that can be sweet, painful, embarrassing, innocent, impassioned, misunderstood, awkward, scary, and life-changing. It is one of the events that mark the shift from childhood to adulthood.

There may have been teen love stories before the sixteenth century, but let’s start with Romeo and Juliet, a perennial favorite that has been remade dozens of times and has been performed on stages around the world every year for the last 400. This story is a tragedy. These two are so young and tender that the weight of the warring feud between their families is too much for them and kills them both. From West Side Story’s adaptation (1961, Ernest Lehman adapting Arthurs Laurents’ and Jerome Robbins’ musical) to Franco Zeffirelli’s (1968) and Baz Luhrmann’s (1996), the story varies little and continues to move audiences. Hailee Steinfeld played Juliet in 2013’s remake (screenplay by Julian Fellowes of Downton Abbey fame). Douglas Booth played her Romeo.

When I write about Baby Love, I mean stories where both people are young. Whether boy/girl, two boys, two girls, or two neutral gender kids, they both need to be young. When one is underage and the other is much older, you get into a whole different territory, one that most of us don’t want to travel to. It may still be love, but it may also be wrong. Lolita (1962, Vladimir Nabokov adapting his own novel; 1997, Stephen Schiff’s adaptation) has very few viewers on the planet rooting for the 12 year old girl to end up with her 50 year old lover whether played by James Mason or Jeremy Irons. (Chapter 28, Unavailability, see Difference in Age.)

If both are young, we root for them, hope for them, remember what it was like to be them. We root for them to learn how to love well and not hurt each other or themselves too much. We hope for them to come away from it undamaged, and still believing in love itself. And we remember that feeling when for the first time we found someone else’s hand holding ours or our young untasted lips colliding against teeth and braces and chins. The thrill of first times.

The good news about Baby Love is that the obstacles are readily available. Better even. They’re unavoidable. You don’t even have to reach far. Forget about pining for somebody who’s sleepless in Seattle; if you’re 12 and she lives 5 miles away, it might as well be Seattle. You won’t even get your learner’s permit for years.

In Love Actually (2003, written and directed by Richard Curtis), one of the intertwined love stories centers on Daniel’s (Liam Neeson’s) little boy Sam (Thomas Sangster) who is in love with a girl in his class who is moving away. Her name is Joanna (Olivia Olson). And Sam hasn’t told her how he feels. He has recently lost his mother, who coincidentally was also named Joanna, and Sam is now so upset about losing this girl, who may not even know he exists, that he is forced to confide in his stepfather for ideas and advice.

Daniel knows something’s up with this brooding, obviously miserable little boy.

Daniel bursts out with a short laugh of relief. Sam stares daggers back at him.

Love can be total agony at any age, but when you’re a kid, and it’s your first time feeling all of these crazy new things, everything is magnified. It’s not smaller because you’re small. It’s much bigger, with nothing to compare it to and not much hope it can last.

In A Little Romance (1979, screenplay by Allan Burns), Diane Lane plays 12-year-old Lauren, an American girl living in Paris, whose diplomat father is transferred back to the States just as she falls in love with a French boy, Daniel (Thelonius Bernard), who wants to be Bogart to her Lauren Bacall. So of course they run away to Venice, aided by an old man (Laurence Olivier), so they can sit in a gondola at sunset, kissing as they go under the Bridge of Sighs, which, legend has it, means they will love each other forever. There is no hope they can be together at 12. Logistically impossible. But we want to think that one day they will meet again. And is this foolish, superstitious gesture enough? Absolutely.

In the series The Wonder Years (1988–93, created by Carol Black and Neal Marlens), it’s the late 1960s in suburban America and Kevin (Fred Savage) loves Winnie Cooper (Danica McKellar) from afar (well, across the street), then from close up. And finally, in the wake of her big brother’s tragic death in Vietnam, they share a first kiss. The opposing force is age itself. Has anyone ever lived happily ever after in 7th grade? One of the points of first loves is to learn, and learning comes from experimentation and trial and error and mistakes. We have to make them. All kids do.

In The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne, 13, is locked in a dark attic with her family and another family that includes a 16-year-old son, Peter. In the classic 1959 film, they are played by Millie Perkins and Richard Beymer. Two years of life at this age not only seems endless, but the only boy in the attic becomes the only boy in the world. And if you are going to be sent to a death camp and killed, it is essential to have had the experience of loving someone. However impossible. However briefly. It became one of the brightest sparks of light for a young girl in a dark place. And it has continued to inspire millions of people for more than half a century.

In The Blue Lagoon, Brooke Shields (then 15) and Christopher Adkins (then 19) play teens in Victorian times who are shipwrecked alone together on a deserted island in the South Pacific. They are like Adam and Eve. The only boy and girl in the world. The problem starts as “How will they survive?” and grows into “How will they survive childbirth?”

Brooke went on to star in another early-teen-years romance, Endless Love (1981, screenplay by Judith Rascoe, directed by Franco Zeffirelli), the story of a 15-year-old girl’s first love in the face of parental disapproval. It was remade in 2014, but not interestingly.

Once characters get to high school age there are hundreds of examples of young love stories, and you know them as well as I do. (See Chapter 38 for an exploration of John Hughes’s high school love stories.)

My favorite high school love story is the TV series My So Called Life (1994–1995, created by Winnie Holzman), in which a 15-year-old Angela (Claire Danes) pines for the beautiful Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto). She doesn’t give Brian or “Brain” as he’s nicknamed (Devon Gummersall) a second thought until the short-lived series is nearly over and then it morphs into a teenage Cyrano de Bergerac tale. If you’re in the mood to binge watch something great that you missed, try this one.

Love is love at any age. While it may be amplified out of all proportion in adolescents, it’s no less sweet and touching at 12 than at 82.