Just in time for Valentine’s Day, my ruminations on the state of love, romance, and marriage in contemporary Young Adult fiction:

Boy meets girl.
Boy loses girl
Boy finds girl again.
Marriage, happily ever after.

But now it seems that the recipe for romantic comedy (in the sense of happy ending) in Young Adult novels is more like:

Boy meets girl.
Boy loses girl, or at least complications ensue.
Boy finds girl again.
Mandatory premarital sex in the penultimate chapter.
Ambiguity and lack of commitment.

I’ve read two young adult novels this past week that followed the latter formula, and although I could see it coming, it was a disappointment both times. I liked the characters in both novels. I wanted more for them than a quick coupling in a motel room or an act of incredible vulnerability and tenderness that ended in a nebulous commitment to “see where this relationship takes us.”

The problem with this ubiquitous plot outline is not that premarital sex is mentioned or portrayed or described. Of course, young people engage in premarital sex, and it’s naturally going to be a part of young adult fiction sometimes. However, the problem that I see is that young people are being trained —in books, movies, magazines and on the web– to expect that their relationships with the opposite sex will lead to one night stands and uncommitted sex. No one connects sex to marriage, either before or after the act; no one seems to want commitment or marriage. Hardly anyone expresses the idea that sex means anything. It’s a just a fun, expected thing to do together on or after a date, like walking on the beach or going to a movie. On the third date or after a certain amount of time, you are expected to have sex if you really care about someone. But don’t think that this physical act means that the relationship has entered a new level of commitment, or heaven forbid, that you and your sexual partner, whom you of course love very much, will get married, spend your lives together, and create a family.

Let me emphasize that sex is NOT what the following books are about. That’s part of the problem. Sex is an afterthought or a step in the logical progression of a relationship that may or may not last. And nobody in any of these books tells the young characters that sex is meant for marriage, that two people who are committed to each other for a lifetime can express themselves in sexual relationship in ways that go way beyond the physical and touch the spiritual. Or even that it will hurt like you-know-what to have a sexual relationship with someone and then break it off and move on. Or, on a very practical level, that STD’s are rampant, and casual sex is an excellent way to contract an STD that may become a more constant companion than the guy or girl you slept with last night.

Here are just a few of the otherwise good recent YA novels that seem to me to reinforce this idea that sex is just another bump in the road, something to be experienced whether the relationship is going to last for five months or for a lifetime:
Harmonic Feedback by Tara Kelly. An autistic teen learns that sex can feel incredibly good and bring her close to the young man she loves, but neither the girl nor her paramour mentions marriage.
Amy and Roger’s Epic Detour by Morgan Matson. Semicolon review here.
Saving Maddie by Varian Johnson. Semicolon review here.
Willow by Julia Hoban. Semicolon review here.
Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler. Semicolon review here. Sex as a game, recreation for the bored and the vacationing.
How to Say Good-bye in Robot by Natalie Standiford.
After the Moment by Garrett Freyman-Weyr.

There’s just no sense whatsoever in these books of the sacredness of a sexual relationship. Our bodies are connected to our souls. We are persons made in God’s image, and what we do with our bodies affects our entire being. Sexual coupling was intended for a committed long-term marriage relationship, and without the commitment, it’s a harmful and ultimately unfulfilling act for both the man and the woman involved. When are we going to tell teens and each other the truth about sex?

Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.” But whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in spirit.
Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.

Somebody Everybody Listens To by Suzanne Supplee.

The Heart Is Not a Size by Beth Kephart.

These are two very different books with a common theme: how does a young woma grow up, get past or through her issues and problems and imperfections, and change her life— and the lives of those around her?

In Somebody Everybody Listens To, Retta Lee Jones is a singer with a dream; she wants to go to Nashville and somehow sing songs that will be on the radio where everybody will listen to her music. It’s not so much that Retta wants to become rich or famous, although living somewhere besides the old car she drives to Nashville would be a welcome change. Retta just wants someone to listen to her, someone besides her best friend Brenda. She wants to escape her unhappy home and her estranged parents and become her own person. And as unlikely as it seems, Nashville and the country music scene become her path to adulthood.

It’s a good story that doesn’t pull many punches about the danger and the improbability of even tying to make it as a singer in Nashville. Retta Lee meets drunks and bitter wannabes and lecherous men and star-struck teenagers. But she also makes friends with Ricky Dean, the tow-truck driver who fixes her car and gives her a job, and Emerson Foster, a student at Vanderbilt who becomes Retta’s encourager, and even Chat, the skeptic whose harsh criticism will test Retta’s resolve. Any girl who plans to “make it in the music business” should be given a copy of this book along with some sage advice. However, as Dolly Parton once said, ” You’ll never do a whole lot unless you’re brave enough to try.”

Bravery and taking a chance on a dream are also the themes of Beth Kephart’s newest book, The Heart Is Not a Size. This one felt a little weird to me because it’s about two girls, Georgia and her best friend Riley, on a mission trip (or a good works trip) to Juarez, Mexico. I’ve been to Juarez, and although I’ve never worked in that city, I have been on several mission trips to other border towns, Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros, and Acuña. I’ve worked in the hot summer Mexican sun, and I’ve been to the colonias, the poverty-stricken villages that grow up around Mexican border cities. So a lot of what Ms. Kephart was writing about was familiar, and yet there were distinct differences from my own experiences.

The group of teens in Ms. Kephart’s book, who were working to build a neighborhood bathroom and shower facility in a poor colonia called Anapra, were working with a secular group called GoodWorks, loosely associated with a church in Mexico, but with no Christian focus. I kept expecting the young people in the book to come together in the evening and pray for each other and for the success of their work in Anapra. I kept expecting them to turn to God for help in understanding themselves and their relationships with each other and with the villagers. But Georgia and Riley and the other teens just continued to dig down deep within themselves and to pull out inner resources that they didn’t know they had.

In fact, as I think about it, the message of both of these books seems to be that if you need to change, if your life is going in the wrong direction, dig deep and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, maybe with a little help from your friends. In fact, in Somebody Everybody Listens To, a preacher gives that exact message, telling a funeral congregation: ” . . . you are the one that’s got to change yourself. The good Lord just cheers you on.” And in A Heart Is Not a Size, Georgia just has herself: “I wasn’t letting anything else get in my way–not the dogs, not the dust, not myself, not the blackbird that banged in the place of my heart. I wasn’t going to be beat by panic. Not this time.”

Wonderful stories, but ultimately a discouraging message. What if you don’t have the inner resources to change yourself? What if your friends desert you? What if God seems more like an angry judge than a cheerleader? What’s the message for those of us who fail and fail again and finally can’t even get up off the ground?

But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. ~Ephesians 2:4-10

A friend of mine was quoting someone not long ago, and she said something like, “Jesus didn’t come to make bad people good; he came to bring dead people to life.” There’s a corollary to that statement: We can’t save ourselves by working really, really hard. If God’s not more than a cheerleader, if He’s not a saviour, we’re a bunch of dead ducks.