The Allure of the 'Sad Girl' Complex

BY CARRIE FOLEY

(Images from Google Images and Pinterest)

I’m currently in the midst of a ‘Fleabag’ re-watch, and first of all: I love this show. It gets better with every watch, because every time you see it again you feel like you understand it even more. There are so many details that I missed the first time around that I’m catching now and being absolutely floored by. ‘Fleabag’ is so incredibly intelligent and painful and amazing, it is worth absolutely every single bit of hype it has received. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, you are a genius. 

BEFORE WE CONTINUE… I want to clarify that when I talk about ‘sadness’, in this article, I am not talking about mental illness. Mental illness is not your fault, you are not enabling it by enjoying TV shows that aren’t all sunshine-and-rainbows. The point of this article is to discuss the Internet’s obsession with pessimism and nihilism. I’m not out to attack you for doing the best you can.

However, it got me thinking. As a woman who is now officially in her twenties, I feel hugely connected to shows like ‘Fleabag’ and ‘Normal People’, and Phoebe Bridgers’ and Taylor Swift’s music. As does almost every woman in her twenties, I’m sure. For most of us, we are ‘just like other girls’, and we’re fully embracing it: going on our hot girl walks, taking almost religious care of our skin after neglecting it as a teenager, and perfecting the art of timing an ‘everything shower’ with fresh sheets. All of this is, of course, soundtracked with sad indie pop music, ‘Fleabag’ and ‘Normal People’ quotes and those TikTok’s with the sad songs playing over a slideshow with posts about girlhood. We live and breathe Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Sally Rooney, and rightfully so. But as incredible as all of these arts of media are, why are we so fixated on this idea of being a ‘sad girl’? What is it about female characters that are chronically sad and heartbroken and grieving, whether that’s grieving someone they lost or a past version of themself, that is so addictive?

Surely it is this kind of obsession with the aestheticism of sadness that makes people so afraid to recover. As beautiful as these shows and these songs are, how long can we consume them before it does detrimental things to our mental health?

These are questions I have asked for a long time, and not just about these ‘sad girl’ shows. When I was about fifteen, when my mental health was at its worst, I remember being so afraid of getting better because I was made to believe by the Internet that the thing that best fueled my writing was my pain. Pain is easiest to write because it is so raw and close to home and so emotional, and it’s the most gratifying because people resonate the most with it. If you want someone to be really compelled by your writing, you write something emotional and something painful. That’s how I was always made to think, and that’s what I believed.

I want to make sure that you know, that is not necessarily true. Try to think of the most beautiful poem you’ve ever come across if you can, maybe something that came up on your Pinterest and really stuck with you. For example, I think of Wendy Cope’s The Orange and Laura Gilpin’s The Two-Headed Calf. Both of those poems are about hope, and about joy in the present moment regardless of what is to come. Good writing doesn’t have to be painful writing. That isn’t to say painful writing isn’t good writing, either, I only mean that there is a place for it and it should not be all-consuming. 

I think the beauty of shows like ‘Fleabag’ and ‘Normal People’ is that they get the human experience, particularly the female experience, so right. They’re not in-your-face about it, either, it’s so stunningly subtle that sometimes it takes a couple of watches for you to realise what something was really saying. It feels so intimate and every time you find a new detail to resonate with you feel this piece of media connect so deeply, like it’s spoken to a part of you that you didn’t have the words to address until now. Additionally I think that in the shows themselves, they are not only about sadness. They are about continuing to live despite the sadness, and I think that in itself is the very essence of the human experience. 

I think that the reason we are so fixated on shows and music like this is because it speaks to a very vulnerable, but very relatable, part of ourselves. I think there certainly is a space for them, and arguably there is a need for more shows like them because they have connected in a way nothing else has been able to with an entire generation of young people. However the problem comes with obsessive consumption, for example TikTok’s fixation with sadness and glamorising it to the point of discouraging people from getting better. The Internet is a dangerous place to be when it comes to mental health because it is a cesspool of people who get to just say their every damaging opinion. Also, there is a difference between talking about mental health, and saying objectively harmful things. This line repeatedly gets crossed, and this is where the issue arises. People cling to depressing shows and films and songs and books, in part because they feel seen in them, but also in part because it is easy to believe that media needs to be devastating to be good. 

The point of ‘Fleabag’ and ‘Normal People’ and Phoebe Bridgers and Taylor Swift isn’t to fuel people’s romanticisation of sadness. They are cathartic, and give people the room to feel the things they might not otherwise be able to. But ultimately, they are about hope: the message is, these characters have been through so much but look at them, carrying on anyway. Life goes on and there are better days ahead. An artist might put out a breakup album, but by the end of the album the message is hope. They have worked through the pain and they are moving on. 

So, yes. There certainly is space for these shows and these songs and I firmly support them as pieces of art, but it’s important to remember that they are art. They’re not real life. You’re a multi-faceted human, not a character designed to express one element of the human experience. You are allowed to be hopeful and optimistic about your life, and you are allowed to want better for yourself.