Dostoevsky and the myth of pure teenage love: materialism comes later

The myth of pure teenage love: Dostoevsky didn't say what you think

There is an idea that keeps resurfacing in conversations about relationships: that teenage love is the purest and truest because at that age a woman is not yet selfish or materialistic. The thesis is attributed to Dostoevsky, although the Russian writer never put it exactly that way. In his works, such as The Adolescent or The Brothers Karamazov, what he explored was the purity of youthful ideals versus the corruption of the adult world, not any supposed absence of materialism in women. Youth there represents a stage of maximum devotion and search for truth that clashes with the cynical, economic realism of society. The discussion, however, goes far beyond philology.

What Dostoevsky actually said about young love

The confusion is common. The author of Crime and Punishment is cited as an endorsement of a theory about teenage female purity that does not appear anywhere in his work. What is there is a melancholic look at how the ideals of youth become corrupted with age. In White Nights, the character of Nastenka, 17 years old, gets engaged to the protagonist when her lover seems to have abandoned her; but as soon as the other man reappears, she wastes no time in dumping the poor sucker and going back to him. Read today, the scene works as a warning about the emotional rollercoaster rather than a celebration of teenage purity.

The debate over whether teenage love is purer has an economic layer that is worth separating from the literary one. Some argue that at that age women are in their peak hypergamy phase, with celebrity stickers on their folders, and that what is called love is really hormonal frenzy plus a lack of experience to assess a man's real value. The consequence, according to this reading, is that many give themselves foolishly to low-value men whom they mistake for leaders. With maturity, hypergamy does not disappear, but they learn prudence and develop better analysis to evaluate height, build, character and other variables they overlooked when they only looked at social popularity.

True love and the first giving of yourself: do you only love once?

Against that economistic view, another school holds that true love is the one you feel for the first person you truly loved. The argument is that you cannot give your loyalty, your intimacy and the purest part of yourself more than once. You may love other people, but that kind of giving, at that level, will never happen again. It is also pointed out that the more you lose in a relationship of extreme love, the more room there is to relate well and healthily with yourself. In the end, one can come to have a loyal love story with oneself through the things one manages to do well.

The biological objection soon appears: what is described as pure love would be nothing more than the mating urge, an instinct shared by all mammals. To say that an old mare only felt true love when she was young and was mounted for the first time is, for this school, a form of anthropocentric romanticism. Another line of analysis reduces it to a chemical reaction to get pregnant by the one you fall for. The discussion, at bottom, is about whether teenage love is a cultural phenomenon or a biological mechanism.

The idealization of youth as a memory bias

There is a factor that is often overlooked: the bias of memory. When you take stock of your life in adulthood, you assess the different stages through memory, which in itself adulterates reality. For an adult it is normal to idealize adolescence and youth, because as a rule hopes are still intact, life is full of goals to achieve and things to discover, something that dwindles drastically over time. The comparison sometimes made is revealing: if someone had to write about a year of their life at 17 or 20, they would write a 400-page book; if they did it today, a page and a half would cover the year.

The conversation also drifts toward the question of materialism. The initial thesis holds that at that age a woman loves you for who you are, with no economic calculation. The data available in the discussion neither confirm nor refute this, but they do suggest that the perception of purity may in fact be a projection of the one who remembers. The phrase attributed to 19th-century Russia —"is there anyone who lives well in Russia?"— serves as a reminder that the view of youth has always been tinged with social melancholy.

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In the end, the question of whether teenage love is the purest and truest is left without a definitive answer. What emerges is a tension between three narratives: the literary one, which idealizes youthful ideals; the economic one, which reduces them to hypergamy and inexperience; and the biological one, which dissolves them into mating urge and chemistry. None wins. And the unsettling fact is that, according to the discussion itself, the giving of the first time is never repeated, but it does not guarantee that what peine was love and not something else.