relationships: teen/young adult: page 2

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.. The Prince and Me is fairy tale romance about a pre-med student who falls in love with a Danish Prince who refused to follow the traditions of his parents and has come to the US to quench his thirst for rebellion.

Paige (Julia Stiles) who hails from rural Wisconsin and Chris (Luke Mably) the Danish man who would be king, come from two different worlds, but there's an undeniable attraction between them.

Stiles sees a connection between herself and the fictional Paige.

"I think I learned a lot about myself by playing her," the actress explains. "Going into it, like my character, I knew that I'm really focused, driven and career-oriented, and never really fantasized about love and marriage.

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.. "But as we were rehearsing and I'm playing Paige more and more, I realized that her sarcasm is sort of a defence mechanism, a way of being antisocial and sort of protecting herself from the possibility of being rejected by a guy.

"It occurred to me that I do that too," Stiles confesses.

Asked if she could ever give up a career for a Prince or the love of her life, Stiles is typically serious. "Maybe this is still me being guarded.

"I feel as if you can have your cake and eat it too, so whoever would sweep me off my feet would appreciate my ambitions. What I look for in a guy is passion and ambition and there's nothing sexier than intellect, so hopefully that would be reciprocated."

DarkHorizons.com interview by Paul Fischer, Mar 8 2004

left: Julia Stiles and Luke Mably © Paramount Pictures
right: Stiles in "Mona Lisa Smile"

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teenreads excerpt from novel Cracks by Sheila Kohler
["Cracks" is South African vernacular for adolescent crushes.]

Miss G looked beautiful and brave, and the chapel looked like a castle. Fuzzie says Miss G has an aquiline nose, which means she looks like an eagle. Miss G is lots of girls' crack.

When you have a crack you see things more clearly: the thick dark of the shadows and the transparence of the leaves in the light and the soft glow of the pink magnolia petals against the waxy leaves.

You want to lie down alone in the dark in the music room and listen to Rachmaninov and the summer rains rushing hard down the gutters.

You leave notes for your crack in her mug next to her toothbrush on the shelf in the bathroom. If you accidentally brush up against your crack, and feel her boosie, you come close to fainting.

from bookslut.com review by Sonia Pereira :

Here's the deal, Cracks isn't merely a thriller revolving around the disappearance of a fourteen-year-old Italian princess at a boarding school in the middle of some vast veld in South Africa during the 50's.

Oh, no. If the rousing aspects of such a spine-tingling plot aren't enough, Kohler manages to write a story about the complexities of teenage girlhood passions including all the terrors and pleasures girls instill in each other as seductively as shooting heroin into their pretty little veins.

At once a sort of amalgamation of Lord of the Flies, John Dollar, The Secret History, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and the superbly sublime film Heavenly Creatures, Kohler's novel takes the reader into the world of blistering South African summers and the small inimitable lives of thirteen female friends. ....

photo: Melanie Lynskey, Kate Winslet in Heavenly Creatures [dvd]

....Cracks by Sheila Kohler

[How did your relationships with your friends change when you got the role on "Roswell?"]

It changed them all, because in the first season, I was really fighting everything, I was like, 'This is not happening to me -- I'm still in college.' I didn't want it to be different from my friends, but that fight made it really worse, because I wasn't expecting my life to change, but after a while, you start to resent yourself for not enjoying what is happening to you and you're doing it because you want to make the people close to you feel comfortable with it.

So it takes a little while to accept what is happening, and say, 'Ok, I can't be ashamed or embarrassed, or feel like I owe other people things because I've gotten lucky.' So, you sort of have to work at it...

I think it's more like a life metaphor than just my situation. But, now at this point, I don't see it as a big deal. It's exciting, but you have to be like, 'Ok, this is my job, this is what I love to do, and I shouldn't be embarrassed because I'm an actor.'

Shiri Appleby [Venice magazine, Oct. 2001]

Your daughter's friendships with other girls are a double-edged sword -- they're key to surviving adolescence, yet they can be the biggest threat to her survival as well.

The friendships with the girls in her clique are a template for many relationships she'll have as an adult. Many girls will make it through their teen years precisely because they have the support and care of a few good friends. These are the friendships where a girl truly feels unconditionally accepted and understood -- and they can last into adulthood and support her search for adult relationships.

On the other hand, girls can be each other's worst enemies. Girls' friendships in adolescence are often intense, confusing, frustrating, and humiliating, the joy and security of "best friends" shattered by devastating breakups and betrayals.

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.. Girls' reactions to the ups and downs of these friendships are as intense as they'll later feel in intimate relationships. These early relationships can propel girls into making dangerous decisions and shape how they mature into young women.

....Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities
of Adolescence - by Rosalind Wiseman

Women usually fall in love in their first years of college. There's a great conflict for women about who comes first in a relationship. Let's face it, women tend to put the person they've fallen in love with first.

So you see these smart ambitious young women come to college with all these big plans, but then they fall in love, and all their priorities change. It happens during college, in terms of the workload they take.

It happens as they graduate, and many put off graduate school to feed the relationship. Maybe they work to support their partners, or they follow them. Then once they have children, those original goals are pushed far off.

It's surprising how often I hear women tell me they had wanted to go into medicine or a technical field, but for some reason or another they take another path.

The trend in the country now is to marry a little later, so presumably more women are taking those years for graduate school or to pursue their professional goals.

[But are we still seeing lots and lots of young girls give up what they hope to do because of relationships?]

Absolutely. Many don't have a fixed plan for their future, because they don't think they need one.

They've been raised to think they have it all, so when they encounter obstacles, they're not prepared.

Young women today have many, many, many, more opportunities. I think it gets easier for every generation.

But because nobody talks about relationships, I think young women today are even less prepared than the generation before them."

Sally M. Reis, PhD****[The Hartford Courant, August 24, 1998]

[image from book: Illuminations by Joyce Tenneson - more on: photography: page 3]

Some very attractive young women invented boyfriends to give them an excuse not to date, allowing them more time to pursue their work in school and their own interests. Gifted young women from Puerto Rican or other Latina groups reported that inventing boyfriends enabled them to achieve while being able to exist within their culture...

Rosa.. did not date at all until her junior year of high school and then she invented a boyfriend who was away at college, explaining that for a talented Puerto Rican female to date would mean she would have to put her hopes and dreams on hold and pay attention to her boyfriend: "It's not that I'm not interested. It's just that I see myself doing my thing first. Males always have to be first in a relationship. And, sometimes, they don't like that you're smart"

<< from article: Internal barriers, personal issues, and decisions faced by gifted and talented females, by Sally M. Reis

Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore
in Ghost [1990]

Kirsten Dunst still believes there's a man out there for her - although it's getting harder and harder to find him. The Virgin Suicides beauty, who has been romantically linked with her Spider-man co-star Tobey Maguire, is finding fame can be an impediment to romance.

She says, "Sometimes I get sad about it and I'm like, 'Is there a guy out there for me?' "I have this whole fairytale vision in my head because I was brought up on movies and storybooks that tell me I'm going to find my soulmate, get married, and have a perfect life. I would love for that to happen but it's really hard to meet people." [imdb.com Celebrity News: 9th May 2002]

I sort of hope marriage is the natural thing. But I've grown up working in this business, and I've met maybe one person who has a normal love relationship. Moving from place to place, being separated, having to enact love scenes constantly -- it's the weirdest lifestyle you could possibly imagine.

Especially as a woman. With men you've got action movies -- they don't always involve a sex scene. But basically every woman always has to have a love scene. And some [male actors] are just golden. It's just sinful that people can be that good-looking, that kind, and exude that sort of charisma all at once.

It's like you should disburse the wealth a little bit more. So when you're put in a position of pretending to be in love with someone, and especially when they're much more attractive than your average guy on the street -- it's obviously gonna lead to strangeness. You may be tempted, but you don't have to make out with the person you're tempted with, as part of your job.

Natalie Portman [Premiere mag. June 2002]