"i thought you knew"

i've been thinking a lot about the summer i turned pretty for some reason, despite the last season coming out like a year ago. that show is, simply put, not good. incredibly entertaining, yes, (except for whatever the hell was going on in some of season 2) but not award-winning in any way. and i'm completely at a loss to what this upcoming movie is going to be about. anyway, despite all this,  it's on my mind. the plot could be quite compelling, for instance, if it was treated not as a teen romance but a darker drama about two families torn apart after the death of one of their mothers. i always found it a little messed up that susannah tells belly as she's growing up that she's always seen her marrying one of her sons. this takes on a whole level of gravity when susannah dies, and a teenage belly's love life is complicated by the burden of her dead family friend/role model's wishes. no wonder when her relationship with either conrad or jeremiah falters she runs back to the other one! according to their mother, she has no other romantic options. there's an interesting psychological thing there, but the show doesn't take this approach, so let's just leave that alone. 

something that the show does seem to do purposely to great effect is to show how our internal insecurities and anxieties keep us from truly being there for the people around us. in season 2, belly and conrad end up on the beach at night (shocker) and begin arguing about their breakup that last winter:

belly: "if I had known that you cared that much about me, and about us, if i had known, then i would have fought for you!

conrad: "what do you mean? i thought you knew! from the moment we kissed on the beach i thought you knew!"

paired with christopher briney's delivery, the line "i thought you knew" becomes so haunting. because how many loved ones have we inadvertently hurt when we've held back from them out of fear and embarrassment? how many relationships have we doubted because others did the same to us or because we didn't know how to see their love through the haze of our own negative self-image? there can be this hopeless distance between two people, even if they have all the love in the world for each other. we can't just assume that our love shows through. maybe instead of filtering and suppressing the strong feelings we have for one another to make them feel palatable, controlled, and unobtrusive, we channel that love and honesty into our actions and words every day without shame. because at the end of the day, we don't all get dramatic beach confessions to set the record straight. 

-HummingbirdPanda