I am aware that the families that we see on screen don’t exist. Mine is farther than those ideal ones than some others – still, they don’t exist. However, they are not unreal just because they are romanticised, but also, among other things, because how they deal with conflicts is unreal. The conflicts that arise just disappear. For obvious reasons, I get that, who wants to watch TV shows with never ending conflicts. I am thinking again about ‘This is us’ as an example. In one of the episodes, the main characters’ parents have a huge fight, one of the reasons being that the mother/wife feels frustrated because she is a housewife/stay-at-home-mom with no dreams or hobbies of her own. The fight lasted one episode, and the issue never came out again. In all the later episodes she is happier than ever, she seems to have forgotten that she was shouting at her husband for not letting her having dreams or hobbies of her own. They keep on living as the fight didn’t happen, and the husband kept on doing nothing in the house, and the wife kept on cooking and cleaning with no help or support. He is great with the kids, but that’s normal, otherwise they wouldn’t be this perfect-from-the-outside family. Well, the part about keeping on like the fight didn’t happen does sound like the way my parents were dealing with conflicts, the difference being that they were growing more and more distant and sad after every fight.
Blabbering of a millennial 