A friend introduced me to the Twilight series, and I admit, I found the books interesting, even though I didn’t jump on the whole “Team Edward” or “Team Jacob” bandwagon or buy T-shirts with the characters’ faces on them. The phenomenon certainly has swept the nation, though—so much so that many authors are trying to hit the same demographic and have started writing more vampire stories than ever before.
I worked for a publishing house last year, and asked my husband to start skimming the submissions for me and tell me which ones were Twilight knock-offs and which weren’t. I rented the first movie so he could get an idea of the story without having to read the book, which is written first person from a female’s perspective, and I knew it would drive him up the wall.
I expected the movie to similarly drive him nuts, but was really surprised to see that he enjoyed it. He liked the hunting aspects, the chase, the suspense of who was going to drink whose blood first. The romantic elements, he didn’t so much care for, but he did pick out and identify parts that were interesting to him.
I found this fascinating, and to me, it represents just how differently the male and female brains work, wired in their own unique way. We see the things we want to see, from the perspective of our own world view. Of course, I enjoyed the chase scenes too. Of course, he noticed the romantic parts. But coming at the movie from the male and female perspectives, our experiences were different.
It’s important that as we view life as a married couple, that we understand that we aren’t going to see things the same way. Something that may be very upsetting to her won’t faze him at all. Something that just weirds him out will seem perfectly normal to her. And we don’t have to share the same tastes in books, music, or vampire movies. We are unique individuals, and we’ll have our own tastes.
Sometimes you’ll get lucky to find something you can both enjoy … in our case, it was a Twilight movie. But we didn’t enjoy it the same way—we enjoyed it on our own terms, and that’s perfectly all right.
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Are You a Closet “Twilight” Mom?