Touched by a Vampire (4 page)

We’ll also find that
we
cannot fulfill this role either. I’d be horrified if my husband tried to center his life on me. I’m terribly flawed; he’d be terribly let down. But I’m delighted that we can love each other
as
weak, limited human beings. Though I am flawed and annoying, he loves me. Though he is flawed and annoying, I love him. There is real beauty in that. We cannot be the center of each other’s lives. We can, though, love each other steadily in the midst of our imperfections. But we can only do this because God is the center of our lives.

We can’t discuss love in the Twilight series without paying attention to the love triangle that forms between Edward, Bella, and Jacob. For most Twilight fans, Edward has become the symbol of everything a girl could want. He is the handsome, intense love that so many long for. A smaller but vocal contingent of fans, though, prefers to focus energies on Jacob. When the novels weren’t completed and it seemed possible that Bella might choose Jacob, these fans rooted for him. They lament Bella’s choice of Edward over Jacob.

However else love works in the world, one fact remains: Love is complicated. We catch a glimpse at some of the ways love can be complicated as Meyer’s story grows. When Edward leaves Bella in his attempt to protect her from the dangers of the vampire world, her only solace comes from her friendship with
Jacob. Jacob is a family friend, and he comes to be a best friend to Bella. He is there for her through the depression and pain that overtake her when she loses Edward. They spend long, happy hours together working on bikes and talking companionably. Though Jacob is a werewolf, he is also the boy next door, the parallel to Bella’s own everygirl character. He is handsome but awkward. A leader but hesitant to lead. He loves Bella. If Edward is a drug for Bella, Jacob says, Jacob is something entirely different in her life. He tells her that their fit together is natural, that he would have been for her not heroin, but fresh air and sunshine.

Though it happens only after a lot of denial, Bella eventually recognizes some of the complications of love. She realizes that she loves both Jacob and Edward. She hates that loving both of them hurts both of them, especially Jacob. This leads Bella to deep self-loathing. Because she thinks love is supposed to be an all-consuming, irresistible force, she sees her love for
both
Edward and Jacob as deviant. She beats herself up emotionally for being untrue.

But what if feeling love for two people is not deviant, but normal? If we are freed from the ideology of the soul mate, we can view Bella’s situation, caught between Jacob and Edward, quite differently than she does when she is berating herself. If love is about fated soul mates, Bella is right. Her love for both Edward and Jacob is a terrible thing. But if love is about good, healthy choices to remain committed to another human being,
we can think more clearly about finding a Jacob attractive when we’re already committed to an Edward. It’s normal to be attracted to attractive people. It doesn’t mean we were wrong all along about who our soul mates were. If we’re committed to someone though, we can recognize that attraction for what it is—an acknowledgment that this other person is good, is beautiful. We can recognize it without being compelled to act on it. We can stay faithful to the one we’re committed to, move past our romantic desire for the other person, and find paths to real friendship.

Bella gives up her entire life—her relationships with parents and friends and even her humanity—in order to be with Edward. Her transformation from human to vampire is excruciatingly painful, but she hides the pain and lies about it to her love. “When you loved the one who was killing you,” she says, “it left you with no options. How could you run, how could you fight, when doing so would hurt that beloved one? If your life was all you had to give your beloved, how could you not give it? If it was someone you truly loved?”
⁴

When a human love becomes the center of all that you are, that love acquires the power to destroy. Bella learns that love
can “break you.”
⁵
Early in the story, Edward sees the danger involved for Bella in loving him. He knows he is a threat to her, and he even admits to a certain amount of selfishness. Though he endangers her, he wants to be with Bella too much to leave her alone. He describes himself as a monster, as inhuman. He is surprised that Bella wants him anyway.

Both Bella and Edward are willing to die for each other. Bella acknowledges this early in their relationship, when she stands unwaveringly in her decision that she wants to be with Edward despite his constant thirst for her blood. The threat that their love will be the death of her is expressed in comparing him to a lion and her to a lamb.

Meyer writes about Bella and Edward operating like drugs for each other. Bella is Edward’s “brand of heroin.”
⁶
Jacob also compares Edward’s role in Bella’s life to that of a drug. Desire for the one you love is compared to a desire for substances that hook people, causing them to react viscerally, to want nothing else in life but to possess and to consume. The metaphor—love as a drug, love as a personal heroin—is a dark one. What does heroin do? It enslaves people. It becomes an obsession, a compulsion. Addicts leave behind family and friends, jobs and school and things that used to give them happiness, in order to get and use the drug. For many, heroin eventually kills.

Edward becomes so horrified by the danger he poses to
Bella that, in
New Moon
, he leaves her. He is trying to protect her but merely exposes her to new ways that an all-consuming love can destroy. When Edward leaves, the pain nearly annihilates Bella. She slips into a dark depression. The healthy aspects of normal life—food, friends, family, fun—hold no interest for her at all when Edward leaves. She stops taking care of herself. She becomes reckless and repeatedly flirts with death.

In
New Moon
, in which Edward and Bella spend large parts of the book apart, Edward shows that he, too, would choose to die rather than live without Bella. When he believes she is dead, he sets off for Italy to commit suicide by provoking the Volturi. He does this immediately, without pausing over the grief it will bring to his family. It isn’t easy for a vampire to kill himself, but Edward’s strong reaction at the thought of Bella’s death sends him seeking his own death without a second thought. He will break the rules of his vampire world, threaten the secret of its existence, in order to get the Volturi to destroy him.

Because their love consumes them, it leaves Bella and Edward vulnerable, open to destruction. They risk death for each other. Bella gives up everything, including her humanity. When Edward speculates about what becoming a vampire might do to her relationship with God, she offers that to him as well. “I don’t want it without you,” she says of her soul, “it’s yours already!”
⁷
Bella is ready to give Edward her entire being—body, soul, and
spirit. She’ll risk eternal separation from God for the sake of her love.

We shouldn’t view the destructive power of the love between Bella and Edward through rose-tinted glasses. At first glance, it seems passionate and intense to think about loving someone so much that you would die for him or die without him. Death should not be taken so lightly. Death is a terrible enemy, a monster that leaves grief in its wake. Think of the effects it would have had on his family had Edward been successful in his suicide attempt.

To center our life on another human being is not just to
risk
having that center pulled away, as Bella’s is when Edward leaves her. To center our life on another human being
guarantees
that center will be pulled away. No human being can or should be all that Bella and Edward demand of one another.

Real love may be complicated, but there are ways of “loving” that aren’t love at all. When love abuses, when love hurts the one who is supposed to be cared for, then love
isn’t
love. Too many features of Bella’s love for Edward parallel the relationships of the many real girls and women who experience abuse.

Abuse in dating and marriage relationships is an enormous problem. We can’t afford to nourish any attitudes that might make abuse seem normal or acceptable. Often, what begins
with one incident of abuse—a slap, a bruise—escalates until the relationship ends with an abusive husband or boyfriend killing the one he is supposed to “love.” Let’s take a look at some key signs of abusive relationships:

• possessiveness and jealousy
  

• trying to control the partner’s behavior
  

• becoming isolated from friends or family
  

• the man tends to be violent, to lose his temper
  

• constantly checking up on the partner, always wanting to keep an eye on her
  

• threatening to commit suicide if the partner leaves the relationship
  

If we examine the list above, it is easy to see how idealizing the love between Bella and Edward might become an excuse for abuse. Edward doesn’t hit Bella, but their relationship exhibits most, if not all, of these features of an abusive relationship. Edward, for instance, tries to control Bella’s comings and goings. He takes parts out of her car to keep her from going to visit Jacob, and he even watches her in her sleep. His reason, of course, is that he is trying to protect her from danger, but this doesn’t make him any less controlling.

If we idealize Bella and Edward’s love, it may be an easy step to seeing controlling, possessive behavior as
loving
behavior. But, truly, it is anything but. Being controlling and jealous is
not
a sign of a great love. It is a sign of something dark and dangerous. When I think about the parallels between violent and abusive
relationships and love as it is depicted in Twilight, I worry about Bella’s behavior and the things Bella says to herself about love even more than I worry about Edward’s desire to control her.

The Twilight Saga suggests that the love between Bella and Edward is true love. If Bella and Edward are used as a measuring stick for love in real life, we may come to believe that true love looks a lot like controlling, abusive love. We may be in danger of ignoring the goodness of gentle love, love that grants freedom to the loved one, love that enjoys everyday life.

Instead of a true love, we see that Bella wants to
belong
to Edward, whatever the cost. She is willing to rationalize all kinds of dangers and threats as part of what it means to love him. The whole scope of the books is about her desire to die for him, and eventually she does.

Other members of the Cullen family are willing to change Bella from a human to a vampire, but she wants it to be Edward. Consider her thoughts on the matter: “I liked the idea that his lips would be the last good thing I would feel…I wanted his venom to poison my system. It would make me belong to him in a tangible, quantifiable way.”
⁸
I don’t know how we can read this as anything but eerie. She wants him to destroy her. When he finally changes her into a vampire, she hides her agony and suffering. She wants to take the pain with a composed face so that Edward won’t know how much he has hurt her.

Dating violence and abuse is very, very common among adolescents. Teenagers can be especially vulnerable to abusive relationships because they don’t have many years of experience with dating relationships and don’t know if what’s going on is normal or not. Teenagers are also made vulnerable by peer pressure to be in a relationship and reluctance to tell adults what is going on. Adults in schools, homes, and churches have a responsibility to protect teenagers who are facing violence.

If our assumptions about love make controlling, possessive, jealous behavior seem normal, we need to change those assumptions. If our views of love condone violence against girls and women, we need to change those views.

It makes sense that we find power in a love that is willing to make sacrifices. In so many ways, we live in a selfish culture, a place where people don’t often give something up for someone else’s sake. One of the reasons Twilight is compelling is that it shows a love that’s very different from the bland me-first love we so often see. The love God promises us in Scripture is a love that sacrifices too, but sacrificial love in the Bible looks very, very different from Bella’s self-erasing sacrifice.

Bella’s sacrifice for Edward is
not
the compelling self-sacrifice that Christians learn about in Scripture. The model of Christian sacrifice is Jesus Christ. In 1 John 3:16, we know
what love is because “Jesus Christ laid down his life for us,” and this is our model for laying down our lives for others. In many ways, Bella’s sacrifice is doable because she sees her life as so very trivial. In contrast, Jesus’s sacrifice is of cosmic significance because of who He is as God. If we hope to imitate Christ’s sacrifice, we cannot despise what we are sacrificing. This is especially true for women and girls in a culture that often subjects them to abuse and violence.

Christian self-sacrifice, particularly for women, is not about the erasure of a life for the sake of romance. It is about sharing the love and grace of Jesus Christ. Bella, despite Edward’s many protests, is too reminiscent of so many women who have been counseled to suffer anything for the sake of a man, to accept abuse, to die for love.

Yes, real love makes sacrifices, but real love does not assume that the thing that is sacrificed has little worth. It doesn’t seek pain for pain’s sake or hide the truth of pain from a loved one. Real love, then, looks very different from Bella’s love for Edward. Real love happens between two people of value, not between a girl who thinks she is nothing and the boy is everything.