Love in the 21st Century
In Barbie, this character’s crush on Barbie represents modern confusion about what love “should” look like.
Who is Ken?
This novel begins with the narrator grieving the suicide of her close friend.
What is The Friend?
This doll begins questioning her identity when she becomes imperfect for the first time.
Who is Barbie?
This famous literary couple initially fails at love due to misjudgment and pride.
Who are Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy?
This text critiques the gig economy by turning romantic roles into paid jobs.
What is The Answers?
In The Answers, this scientific program attempts to create the “perfect relationship” by dividing love into paid roles.
What is The Girlfriend Experiment?
This film uses a montage of real human memories to portray the grief of being alive.
What is Barbie?
This poet’s speaker feels her identity is shaped by exclusion from a suburban “circle.”
Who is Barbie Chang?
Ken’s inability to make Barbie love him back highlights this common modern romantic struggle.
What is unrequited love?
This poetry collection exposes suburban social hierarchies and exclusion.
What is Barbie Chang?
In Pride & Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas marries for this practical reason rather than love, revealing early forms of “strategic partnering.”
What is financial security / stability?
This poet expresses longing and heartbreak through clipped, spare lines in her collection.
Who is Victoria Chang?
This protagonist’s identity becomes fragmented when scientists assign her different “roles” in a relationship experiment.
Who is Mary from The Answers?
In The Friend, the narrator sees the failures of human love reflected in her friend’s loneliness and eventual death.
What is emotional isolation / lack of support?
This novel captures loneliness as a defining emotion of modern life through the narrator’s reliance on a dog.
What is The Friend?
In Barbie Chang, the speaker’s desire to be accepted by the Moms reflects how modern love is tied to this social pressure.
What is the need for belonging or validation?
In Pride & Prejudice, the Bennet sisters experience a quiet grief tied to this social reality limiting their futures.
What is the lack of economic and gender independence?
In The Friend, the narrator’s identity becomes intertwined with the massive responsibility of caring for this creature.
What is a Great Dane?
Barbie Chang’s relationship with the Moms demonstrates that love fails when relationships are based on this fragile condition.
What is social performance / appearance?
This film critiques how patriarchy and capitalist expectations shape women’s lives in America.
What is Barbie?
In The Friend, the narrator’s bond with the dog challenges 21st-century definitions of romantic love by suggesting that meaning can come through this non-romantic form of attachment.
What is companionship or unconditional devotion?
In The Answers, Mary’s longing for a healthier life is complicated by this chronic struggle that shapes her choices.
What is physical pain or chronic illness?
Elizabeth Bennet challenges 21st-century parallels by asserting an identity defined by this, rather than by marriage or class expectations.
What is personal integrity / independent judgment?
The Answers suggests that love fails in the 21st century when it is treated as a system that can be engineered or controlled through this method.
What is emotional outsourcing or scientific manipulation?
Though written centuries ago, this novel remains relevant today because it shows how marriage, status, and gender still regulate opportunity in America.
What is Pride & Prejudice?