Off Campus, Off Course

Reflections on young adult media through the lens of attachment healing

The streaming era has been no stranger to spicy young adult dramas adapted for television. Early 2000s cable saw the likes of Degrassi: The Next Generation, One Tree Hill, and later the cultural phenomenon Gossip Girl. With cable on a steady decline since the mid-2010s, it’s no secret that streaming has changed the entertainment game tenfold. Spearheaded by the cultural success of recent 2020s programming, young adult audiences are craving deeper, more complicated coming-of-age dramas now more than ever.

Prime Video’s adaptation of coastal The Summer I Turned Pretty, Hulu’s toxic Tell Me Lies, and now, Prime Video’s tactful Off Campus all tackle what appears to dominate the mentality of twenty-somethings: relationships. On the surface, yes, there’s a plethora of romance. Underneath the sweaty, tense, long-stared yearning lies a recurrent theme of self-exploration. While the plot pursues the pitfalls of adolescent love, the subtext toes the line between healthy dependence and codependence. Naturally, it raises the recurring question, “How do we navigate love once healing fundamentally alters our perception of it?”

I’ll be honest. I wasn’t immune to the young adult romance mania. In fact, in my awkward middle school youth, I sought the anticipatory butterflies anywhere I could—the CW’s Thursday night lineup, the Divergent trilogy, in standalone novels found in my public library. I clung to hope like static electricity in my hair on a dry, bleak morning. Between scribbling couples’ names in my notebook from my latest series obsession, taping intimate excerpts from novels onto my seventh-grade agenda, and wishing on twinkling stars for love in my bedroom at night, I felt it. 

I embraced it. 

If there were an ideal audience for this kind of media, it was me.

The longing, the escapism, the early brain-body connections showing up in an ambiguous light? 

I had all of it. Little flutters in the pit of my stomach. Short, bated breaths. Heavy sighs. Tingles of warmth radiating from head to toe. That glimmer of hope tying it all together in a neat bow, as if a present I would—eventually—be able to open.

By this stage in my life, I felt very little, existing in a state of perpetual numbness. 

But this? These sensations? Oh, I felt those.

Unbeknownst to me, I was searching for a replacement for the affection I’d lost from my mother. What I believed to be the search for romance turned out to be the search for relief. My mother left me, so I lost myself in as many stories as I could. Somewhere between the pages, I hoped to find the comfort I’d been missing and didn’t yet know how to create for myself.

For the longest time, I chalked it up to being a hopeless romantic. Loving the idea of love. Putting relationships on the ultimate pedestal, believing if I could finally prove or earn my worth, I’d get to feel this way all the time. 

Enduring early on the devastating pain of neglect and abandonment on autopilot, I adopted these beliefs. When the depression stood center stage, this was what I leaned on. Somewhere between the romantic idolization and maternal grief, I developed an anxious attachment style. 

Just make it through the day, I’d tell myself. 

You have another season of Ally McBeal to watch. That’s enough for right now.

Without the modeling of healthy adult love within my grasp, fiction was all I knew, and all I had.

The intensity, the daydreaming, the overwhelming-yet-hopeful uncertainty? Riding the rollercoaster was the standard I was striving towards. If I wasn’t crushing on someone, pining painfully from afar, it wasn’t love. It couldn’t have been! So I made it my mission to have a new crush every year, combing the yearbook through eager hands.

At 12, 13, 14, and beyond, this was my lifeline. In a twist of irony, by the time I matured beyond my middle school anguish, I had a vastly unrealistic idea of love. 

As you may have been able to predict, I struggled in romantic relationships. Forming one felt impossible, given my social anxiety alone. But once part of one for the first time, I realized, eventually, it was for the wrong reasons. Confusing male companionship with male attraction, I became involved in a passion-less, attraction-less, best-friendship with the title of boyfriend-girlfriend. 

Simple, right? Yeah, I was a gem. 

How it lasted nearly a year and a half, I will never know. 

You’re young and dumb once, I guess.

Fast forward through college, a series of surface-level explorations and a years-long trauma-infused “situationship” later, I’d resumed therapy—addressing my attachment wounding for the first time.

Any preconceived notions I had of love and relationships? Consider them erased. 

I was starting from square-one. 

Now, well over a year into my first healthy relationship, watching these made-for-television dramas strikes a different chord.

The Summer I Turned Pretty earnestly portrays a love triangle between brothers in a coastal town, with the main characters sitting comfortably in the 17-22 age range. Tell Me Lies chronicles both the loss and discovery of self amidst toxic relationships on a fictional college campus. And now, Off Campus, similarly set to Tell Me Lies, explores the duality of reclamation after tragedy and the beauty of homecoming with the right partner. With mature, realistic depictions of father-son pressures, domestic violence, sexual assault, the gamut of complicated attachment dynamics, and the pull toward carving your own identity in familiar shoes, Off Campus offers drama—and plenty of it. Sprinkled with spicy  scenes that are bound to rile up even the most modest of viewers, main characters Garret Graham (Belmont Cameli) and Hannah Wells (Ella Bright) deliver a chemistry unmatched by anyone else in the show.

Where it gets murky, though, is where deep down, a part of me still finds the on-screen love more titillating than the routine maintenance of a steady long-term relationship. With Hollywood conditioning intact, I used to strive to replicate that false sense of normalcy. Now? After binging the entire eight-episode run in less than twenty-four hours, I’m left feeling almost…guilty. 

Guilty for missing what love used to feel like, before the therapy. Before the earned security. Before the innate sense of self-worth. Missing the early sparks, feeling the distance between novelty and familiarity day in and day out. Remembering those chest-clutching flutters that made intensity feel telling, and its absence—dull. It’s not the rollercoaster I miss, so much as the physiology that accompanied it. At seventeen, everything is intense. That first glimpse, the first touch, that first kiss. At twenty-seven, especially post-attachment work—the flame has all but burned out.

While many have stopped to suggest that “Love isn’t like the movies,” a stronger line of inquiry asks, “How do we accept the way healing changes our experience of love?” 

I’ve learned to step off the rollercoaster and embrace the million little things that come in between. When I welcomed stability as sexy and intention as excitement, my entire worldview spun on its axle. And yet, as I stream the occasional TV-MA drama, I clutch my bedsheets—this time with my stable sailor at my side. With steady nearby, I still allow myself to escape into the story, knowing when it ends I have his neck to nestle against before we fall asleep.

I used to dream of love as if it were the ultimate birthday present—the definitive Christmas gift that would finally give my life meaning or deem me worthy. All these years later, it carries newfound weight when that worthiness is no longer tied to a fictional romance, but instead sleeps beside you every night. It’s the voice in my head that carries me off to sleep at night when my hamster wheel of a mind won’t slow down. It’s that voice of comfort that tells me I’ve done enough today, performed enough, existed enough. When that worthiness endures from within,

life still spins on its axle—but my worth no longer spins with it.

It’s the steady reminder that my worth was innate all along, between lines of text, between novels, between episodes, merely waiting for its time to stray a little…off course.