What Freedom! The Russian Museum, St Petersburg. Courtesy Wikimedia. In I left Russia for the first time to spend a school year in the United States.
It was a prestigious scholarship; I was 16 and my parents were very excited about the possibility of my somehow slipping into Yale or Harvard afterwards. I, however, could think of only one thing: getting an American boyfriend. I read it lying in bed, feeling my throat getting dry. Staring into its glossy pages, I dreamed that there, in a different country, I would turn into someone beautiful, someone boys turned their heads for.
I dreamed that I would need this kind of pill, too. Two months later, on my first day at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, I went to the library and borrowed a stack of Seventeen s that stood taller than me.
Armed with a highlighter and a pen, I looked for words and expressions that had to do with American conduct in courtship and wrote them out on separate cards, just like my English teacher in St Petersburg had taught me. I soon gathered that the lifecycle of a Seventeen -approved relationship went through several clear stages. Sitting in the American school library, I stared at my dozens of handwritten notes and saw an abyss opening up: a gulf between the ideals of love that I had grown up with and the exotic stuff I was now encountering.
The teen film drama that my generation of Russians grew up with β a socialist replica of Romeo and Juliet set in a Moscow commuter neighbourhood β was deliciously unspecific when it came to declarations of love. It is as certain as my love. Three times three is nine. That means you are mine. What else was there to say? A lthough I did not yet have a PhD in sociology, it turned out that what I had been doing with the copies of Seventeen was exactly the kind of work that sociologists of emotion perform in order to understand how we conceptualise love.
