Perks Of Being A Wallflower ComicHonors English 11ABy: Brandt Abbott10/5/2022
Our perception/views on relationships are influenced by the ones around us.
Charlie is exposed to many relationships throughout his life, but a lot of them are unhealthy relationships. This causes Charlie to have a misunderstanding of what relationships should look like. Bill tries to explain to Charlie that his relationships can be whatever he wants them to be by telling him that “we accept the love we think we deserve” (19 PDF)
The setting that Charlie finds himself in, is a very crazy high school. He is a freshmen in high school, but all of his friends are seniors, and he also has older siblings so he is constantly surrounded by older high school students. This setting and his surroundings cause him to see many high school relationships which a majority of are not healthy. “I had to stop watching at that point because I started to feel sick, but it kept going on, and they kept doing other things, and she kept saying ‘no.’ Even when I covered my ears, I could still hear her say that.”(22 PDF) Charlie is surrounded by terrible examples of relationships which furthers his problem of not knowing what a healthy relationship is.
Charlie does not know how to be in a relationship or what it should be like so he ruins most of his. He dates Mary Elizabeth when he is not in love with her and then he messes up that relationship by kissing Sam in front of his whole group of friends. Charlie couldn’t handle not being able to know how to operate a relationship and so he broke eventually realizing that “Something really is wrong with me. And I don’t know what it is.” (PDF 73) Charlie’s conflict of not handling his emotions and relationships the right way led to him kissing Sam which in turn led to him realizing that he needed to figure out how to properly keep a relationship.
Although Charlie messes up his relationship with Mary Elizabeth he was never truly in love with her but he was in love with Sam. When they start to develop feelings Sam realizes it won’t work and asks Charlie“don't you get it? I can't feel that. It's sweet and everything, but it's like you're not even there sometimes. It's great that you can listen and be a shoulder to someone, but what about when someone doesn't need a shoulder. What if they need the arms or something like that? You can't just sit there and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things.” (103 PDF) Charlie realizes that the relationships that he has observed are wrong and not healthy, but since he has not seen a healthy relationship he doesn’t have the tools to use to develop one. He sits back and lets the other person in his relationships move them along and develop them, because he has never seen how to develop one and is afraid to turn it into the relationships he had seen. Sam is trying to show and tell Charlie what he will need to do in order to develop a good relationship with anyone.
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