Nour Termos | Staff Writer
The core of a “Normal People” relationship is shame in the public eye. A one-sided shame that consumes a Connell struggling with masculinity. A one-sided shame that confuses a desperate Marianne, clutching at signs of reciprocity. Connell is friends with the usual perverted, rude, and arrogant men as a way of fitting in. Although he seems to like Marianne, his emotions contradict his wanted status, and he makes Marianne his secret. The complete separation between public and private that Connell establishes holds a lot of fear and compliance to social expectations. Connell’s shame (which he projects onto her) gets translated through Marianne’s self-loathing.
“You kept me like a secret, and I kept you like an oath” is perhaps the best way to sum up the relationship. Rooney says about Marianne in the book “She felt she would do anything to make him like her, to make him say out loud that he liked her.” To Marianne, the relationship was religion. Everything could be fixed by simply coming back to Connell. She would hold all interactions to the light and dissect them, in the hopes of being truly the first choice for once.
The core of a “Normal People” relationship is that it’s a situationship. It is the epitome of miscommunication. Reading their conversations in the book is physical torture as you can sense the awkwardness and absolute refusal to open up. The problem about “Normal People ” is that what Connell and Marianne have has stuck to them and they do not let go, even after years. They find solace in their secrecy and instability.
It might be portrayed in the book that Marianne’s constant return to Connell is “goals”. But circling back to a destructive and unstable relationship with no attempts at building back her confidence or escaping the abusive cycle only reinforces her detrimental habits. This is another bad aspect of the “Normal People” situationship. You do not learn to separate yourself from the bloodshed because it is all you have ever known. It is safe. But also, because the relationship stayed with both characters for so long that it shaped their path. In the book, Marianne asks Connel if he thinks his life would be better if they were never together, and he just says that he doesn’t know: “I do not know where I would have gone for college”. The absence of another starts feeling like the absence of oneself.
Readers might see Connell as the person Marianne is meant for and she should end up with, but he makes Marianne accept mediocre love while she is completely drowning in him. If Marianne has a family history of abuse and abandonment, with a mother who neglects her, a brother who beats her, and if her trauma makes her exclusively pivot around people with harmful patterns as she finds comfort in them (like her boyfriend in Italy who also beats her, and the photographer she hooked up with in Sweden during her exchange program), then why would Connell be an exception? If anything, he is the archetype. The idea that Connell even loves Marianne is suspicious. Or he loves her in a way she is unable to understand.
In the few times Marianne confronts him about his secrecy, he is revealed to barely really acknowledge her. His fear of rejection from his surroundings eats him up to the point where he is unable to bring the private back to his consciousness. Marianne is unintentionally made into a puppet for intimate instances, and she is thrown into the back of his head. When he invites another girl to the debs (their senior year ball) and Marianne later asks him if he thought of inviting her instead, he simply says “No, not really”. In the book, it is said about Connell that “He has a terrible sense all of a sudden that he could hit her face, very hard even, and she would just sit there and let him” and “She would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted, he knew that”. Connell is deeply aware of Marianne’s submissiveness to him: not only does he acknowledge it, but he reinforces it. Marianne was led to slaughter from the moment she confessed to Connell, and he refused to be seen with her.
Connell is a way more complex character than just a boy trying to fit in and be masculine while having fun with a girl. In the book, he is revealed to severely struggle mentally, from suicide to starting antidepressants, especially after his own friend took his life. Connell’s personal troubles and lack of communication extend beyond Marianne. They are seen through his silence when he is with his mom, his inability to express himself in therapy, his fantasies about lying without water for days and dying of dehydration. In the therapy questionnaire, he circled “3. I dislike myself”. This happens almost at the end of the book, and we can see the self-loathing transferred from Marianne to Connell after high school, and after they stopped performing in front of their classmates.
In one of the parts, it is revealed that Connell’s friends all knew about his relationship with Marianne despite his attempts at hiding it. The separation really only existed in his mind, and all it did was further drive Connell and Marianne apart. So, really, what does that say about love that comes with shame? Will shame deem it invisible, or is shame too intense to be hidden? What about love that worships yet fights against societal norms?