Other stories that present unhealthy pictures of romantic love are the “Twilight” series and “The Notebook,” said Stuckey.
“I love ‘The Notebook.’ It’s terrible. But I remember loving ‘The Notebook’ when I first saw it and thinking that that was a love story,” she said. “That’s actually another example. Totally immoral, totally unethical, not at all a healthy idea of what love and romance and marriage and pursuit should look like, but it really does affect the mind of people married or unmarried.”
Stuckey believes “Wuthering Heights” is part of an overall trend of “dark romance [that] is targeting women and trying to shape what they think about love.”
In addition to the other examples she mentioned, Stuckey brought up “Bridgerton,” a Netflix series called “You,” and the lyrics of pop stars such as Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, and Olivia Rodrigo.
“I just wonder if these unrealistic expectations of what romance should look like are actually keeping women single for longer than they would be,” Stuckey said. “Maybe if they were looking for enduring qualities like…Christlikeness but also just diligence and faithfulness and a quiet confidence and being a good friend.”
“Now, for some people, that’s just God’s plan for you to meet the person that you’re supposed to marry when you’re 40,” she added. “But when this is the cause, that’s a really big problem.”
Stuckey went on to cite scientific studies that showed how media such as “Fifty Shades of Grey” harms women in real life. She also outlined examples of toxic and obsessive behavior displayed by people in the Bible, as well as how the Bible describes healthy love.
“How good is God to not just tell us, ‘Oh yeah, love one another. Oh yeah, be loving. God is love,’ but to actually tell us what love is,” Stuckey said, referring to 1 Corinthians 13. “Love is patient. Love is kind. It’s never irritable. It’s never resentful…love must be kind and patient, never rejoicing in wrongdoing, but rejoicing with the truth.”
Moreover, the Song of Solomon gives a picture of “truly erotic, like, romance, desire, pursuit kind of love,” she said. Stuckey referred to other Bible verses on love, including 1 John 4:7-8, Colossians 3:12-14, and Ephesians 5:25-28, a passage she said that “makes feminists really angry. But this would have been so radically pro-women at the time.”
“This is the kind of tenderness, the kind of humility, the kind of elevating someone’s importance above your own that we just don’t see in any of these novels or these movies,” said Stuckey. “It is all about just rugged desire and fulfilling that as quickly as possible, no matter what the cost is, no matter how it affects other people, no matter how it affects your own heart or your own body.”
“It is all about what you want and doing what you want,” she said. “And God is saying sometimes what you want isn’t right.”
