Many people across the U.S. know all about day time soap operas but in Mexican-American households we tend to have something a bit different. Telenovelas. So telenovelas are basically soap operas that everyone's abuelita loves to watch every weeknight but there seems to be a lot of people blaming telenovelas for how they see love.
In telenovelas there are the usual love tropes used over and over again which are what make the telenovelas so good. Love, passion, hate, deceit, and arguing at the top of a stair case because we all know someone is going down that stair case and either dying or going into a coma. I can hear everyone's abuelita gasping as soon as it happens too.
Telenovelas seem to have skewed the way many of us perceive love in the sense that we are expecting our love to be as grand as a telenovela love. Just look at the TikTok video above and tell younger me that is not possible, I ate that scene up. Many of us who grew up watching telenovelas, and soap operas, with our grandparents know that there is just a sense of connection.
That connection could be due to the fact that many of our grandparents couldn't speak a word of english and were stuck watching one of two spanish channels. A connection that they could relate to home and we were inadvertently exposed to as kids and our main example for many types of love with the occasional hoping of it starting like a telenovela.
We also tend to use telenovelas as a way to see love through rose colored glasses and as a way to live vicariously through those people on the screen. So next time you are watching a telenovela and think to yourself that you want a love like that, maybe take a step back because you might just be pushing yourself down that stair case with your expectations of a telenovela love.