What Bella’s Bad Romance Can Teach Us About the Craft
Everyone says Edward's the toxic one, but Bella's just as bad, and it's instructive
So much of what is sold to Americans as romance is actually super cringey.
The most obvious of these is, as many have already noted, the "Twilight" saga movies, which seem to be ubiquitous during Samhain season. The problems here are pretty well understood at this point. Edward stalks Bella. He is constantly patronizing her by insisting that he knows better than her what she should want or need. His whole initial interest in her stems from the fact that he can't read her mind, and therefore can't really figure her out or control her. He is jealous, and makes her feel bad for having friends that he doesn't like.
Many essays, social media posts, and podcasts have already catalogued Edward's issues and why he is categorically a toxic boyfriend. And it's true. If you think that anything about Edward is romantic or desirable in a partner, I might suggest that you need to seek some therapy, because that codependency tendency you're working has probably already caused you a lot of unnecessary pain.
But what about Bella? Is Bella really merely the hapless victim of a creepy, sparkly, broody vampire?
The truth is that when you really think about it, Bella's got her issues too.
The bottom line is that she fetishizes the status of being a vampire. Sure, when Edward tells Bella that he's really over 150 years old, she's a little surprised and skeeved out. But all Edward has to do is take her on one piggyback ride through the trees, and suddenly she's all in. Parents, friends, career, hobbies, all of it is jettisoned in the pursuit of being with Edward forever, as a vampire.
We all know someone who, when they first get into the Craft, is very much like Bella. They know that this is what they have been looking for their whole lives, and they want it all. And they want it right fucking now.
They suddenly are wearing black all the time, and festoon their body with pentagrams and pentacles or runes or whatever symbols they think make them look the witchy-est. They now have an elaborate altar set up in their living room, usually in a prominent place so that it becomes impossible to enter their home without having to explain what the purpose of this contraption is. They start making a big point of not celebrating Christmas, and correcting everyone who celebrates Halloween by telling them "You know, it's really Samhain."
Being a witch is now their entire identity.
And it’s seductive, this losing of oneself in a chosen identity. Rather than dealing with the things in your life that are inconvenient or problematic or painful, you can be this other person. You can live the fantasy of who you are, as opposed to managing the stark realities of your actual life.
Let’s go back to Bella again — when we meet her all we know is that she is shy and she has divorced parents. Her dad is the police chief of a tiny town in the Pacific Northwest, while her mom is wanting to travel with her new husband, a baseball player who seems to have a penchant for living in places that would be distinctly inhospitable to vampires. Does Bella have any feelings about this? One would imagine she does. Most kids whose parents divorce deal very poorly with remarriage, and a remarriage that ends up forcing her to move out to live with her father is bound to leave a few emotional scars. And rather than really unpack the issues around her real life, the whole point of the Twighlight saga is to give her a glorious distraction — Vampire life — as a way to fill the void in her existence, and completely subsume her identity.
In the end, Bella is using the Cullens to escape her life and avoid dealing with the very real matter of her feelings about her parents’ divorce and what it has done to her life. The Great Love that is represented by Edward is supposed to cure all ills, soothe all wounds, solve all problems and satisfy all desires. And we all know that that’s utter bullshit. No matter how much you love someone, they can’t be the answer to all your problems, and cannot be the thing that meets all your needs. That idea of romance may work in fairy tales or old school Hollywood romance, but in the real world, asking someone to “be your everything” is completely unfair. No one can be all things to a person, and a partner who does this to someone is basically setting them up for failure. Even if Edward isn’t complaining that that’s effectively Bella’s ask, it’s still a horrible expectation to have of another person, and abusive in its own right.
The Craft isn’t a place to hide. It’s a place to discover and find out about yourself. The problem with dropping too far into your badass witchy self is that you can lose the perspective on who you are beyond that. It is true that when you become a witch, that identity informs all the other parts of yourself. Wherever you go and whatever you are doing, you are, in fact a witch while you do that thing. That said, you are also all the other parts of yourself too. I spent a good many years training as an attorney, long before I became a witch. And I would be lying if I said that that part of my self didn’t inform my Craft, or that it didn’t inform other parts of my life. Sometimes that is a good thing that helps bring an interesting and helpful viewpoint on what I am dealing with. And sometimes it gets in the way, distracting me from what I should be focusing on, or leading me to an unhelpful conclusion.
Look, I’m a witch and I teach the Craft to others. I wouldn’t do that if I didn’t believe in the fact that the Craft is a valuable practice and a pretty awesome way to live your life. That said, the Craft isn’t always the first or even the best response to a situation. When my son falls off a scooter and scrapes his knee, my first step isn’t to cast a spell or make an incantation, it’s to pick him up off the ground, dry his tears, and fetch an appropriate Band-Aid for the wound. There will be time later to do a little rhyme over the wound to help reduce the swelling and speed healing. But I would be doing my son an incredible disservice if that were my first or only response.
Becoming Alythia, a High Priestess and Witch in the Church of the Knotted Ash, did not mean I lost or put away other parts of me, or that that became the only true thing in my life. I didn’t stop being my son’s mom. I didn’t stop being a friend to my friends, both in the pagan community and beyond. I didn’t stop being a professional with a career outside the Craft at which I am quite successful and which I have been doing a long time. I did not stop being a daughter to my father, or a sister to my brother. The Craft now informs all those things. But it doesn’t supersede them or negate them.
Being Alythia does not mean my Craft is the answer to all my questions and problems. And expecting it to be is foolish. Throwing myself into the identity of witch as a way to shield myself from my issues is as inappropriate as Bella thinking that being a Vampire will be an effective answer to the hurt caused by her parents.
It’s true that being Alythia is exciting. Witchcraft empowers — it gives you access to deity and to the forces of spirit in new ways. And power is a heady thing. And a dangerous thing. One can become way too enamored of it. One can begin to feel as if you are entitled to things because of that power. And that’s not okay. My witch life is not an escape from my life. And for me to treat it that way would be to do a disservice to my Craft and to myself.
The truth is that there are only a few people who are full-time witches, whose Craft appears to be the total of their existence — their job, their personal lives, their family, their everything. We see them write books and teach workshops and do podcasts and think that they are witchy all the time. And so we think that this is who we are supposed to be too. The raw truth of it is even those people have decidedly mundane aspects of their lives that they must nurture and tend to. Their lives are not 100% consumed with the Craft, and it is highly likely that when they file their taxes, they hire an accountant rather than cast a spell. They have neighbors who are likely not witches. They sometimes have partners or kids who are not part of their practice. Some do have “day jobs” that pay the bills because the Craft certainly isn’t.
Yes, when you become a witch, you now are a witch no matter where you go or what you do. And you will see the world through that lens. But that does not mean that the Craft is front and center in every situation, or that you deploy Craft to solve all of your problems. You are a host of other things, and none of them went away or changed merely because you took up the craft.
What we can learn from the bad romance of Edward and Bella is that the Craft is not an identity that you put on that instantly turns you into a different person, with all your problems sorted and all your future secured. The Craft will change you, but that change happens with time and effort, in the full context of everything you already are and everything you do. To expect otherwise is to place unrealistic expectations on, and fetishize the Craft in an unhealthy way. Bella’s desire to ditch all her human problems, to become a vampire because that means that she can love Edward forever and fully lose herself in his world is straight up toxic, and unfair to her and to Edward as well. Real love doesn’t look like that. And real Craft doesn’t either.
During the Samhain season, many people feel a pull towards the Craft. This season thins both the veil between the worlds, and the veil we often keep over our own practice as witches to conceal it from outsiders, and this often leads to people who have been toying with the idea of following the path to finally declare themselves. New witches, wanting to show their enthusiasm for their new calling, go hard into the “witch aesthetic.” And then there will be some who, seeking to prove they are more substance than style, will want to go hard on their Craft practice so they can show how witchy and badass they can be. The more they can show how entirely their lives are devoted to their witchy-ness, they think, the better and more powerful of a witch they show themselves to be.
It’s natural to expect that someone who is new to the path will be enthusiastic, and in that enthusiasm may drift into things that may look a little overzealous to those of us who have “been around the block a few times.” A little more patience and few less eye-rolls is more than prudent, and compassionate. We were all new to this path once, and most of us have had to quietly disabuse ourselves of our more naive understandings of the Craft as we learn. But it’s our job to model to those new to the Craft a healthy relationship to our Craft. Our Craft can serve a great many functions in our lives, but to expect it to consume every corner of our lives, and occupy our whole existence, is to place an unreasonable expectation on ourselves and our Craft. To do anything else is to be living in a bad romance.